Stina Nordenstam

Stina Nordenstam, much like Lori Carson, has devoted considerable effort across her career to moving beyond comparisons with Rickie Lee Jones. While echoes of that artist can be detected, most of Nordenstam's output tends toward greater fragility, so airy and vulnerable that even a gentle draft might topple it. From the early '90s onward she cultivated an intensely personal, childlike aesthetic that has drawn some listeners in while driving others away. Her first album, Memories of a Color, though still finding its footing and constrained by conventional jazz tendencies, attracted the attention of the British label 4AD, which considered offering her a contract. The deal never materialized, yet the contact exposed her to the label's Red House Painters and This Mortal Coil. Exhausted by the process of making that debut, she waited three years before issuing And She Closed Her Eyes, an album of greater scope and darker mood that reviewers hailed as a significant advance. Even more shadowy was Dynamite, released in 1996, which largely discarded the gentle atmospheres of earlier releases for beats shaped by industrial music and the rasp of scraped guitars. In 1998 came the covers collection People Are Strange, which included interpretations of material by Prince, Tim Hardin, and Leonard Cohen. This Is Stina Nordenstam appeared in 2001 and contained two duets with Suede's Brett Anderson. Three years after that she put out The World Is Saved. Nordenstam has also been sought after as a session singer, contributing to projects by Vangelis, Bill Laswell, and the Flesh Quartet.