No regrets as STONE sells her SOUL

[KiwiCoromandel]

The British singer says she can't be pigeonholed....

At 19, Joss Stone has performed with James Brown and recorded with the Motown greats Gladys Knight and Patti LaBelle, but don't call this middle-class white girl a soul star.

"I don't really have a pigeonhole. I don't like that word and I don't like the word genre," she says. "Tracy Chapman is described as folk, Aretha Franklin is defined as classic soul, Melissa Etheridge is defined as rock, but all of those people are soul singers to me."

Listening to the throaty tracks on her third album, it is easy to believe the woman from rural Devon in Britain grew up in an altogether different place, listening to a gospel preacher on Sundays and sneaking moonshine on the front porch.

Instead, Stone was singing along to her mother's records, soaking up the style of Anita Baker, Donna Summer and Dusty Springfield.

After winning a BBC talent show at the age of 14, singing Summer's On the Radio, Stone was signed by US record executives and released her first album, The Soul Sessions, at 15. The record of soul covers sold almost a million copies in the US alone.

Four years later and in Australia as a late addition to the East Coast Blues and Roots Festival in Byron Bay (she will perform on Friday), Stone is declaring her third album, for which she wrote all 13 tracks, her first true artistic statement.

"I don't mull over songs and I don't like to think about things too much; if it doesn't come out in one day then I just let it go," she says of the album, Introducing Joss Stone."I wrote the album in one go, from April to September, then I went to the Bahamas and recorded it."

Last week the album achieved the highest entry by a British female artist in US chart history, debuting at No.2.

It did not fare so well in Britain, entering the charts at No.12, the result, perhaps, of a critical backlash inspired by Stone's wild behaviour, her decision to dye her hair pink and a tendency to slip into an American accent.

But the singer, who performs barefoot with her eyes closed because of nerves, shrugs off the criticism and says it is all part of growing up, or change, as she prefers to call it.

"Too many people shy away from change but it excites me," she says. "If I went and made the same album again I may as well give up. I needed to break free of that early stuff."

source:AP

image:Steven Siewert:...ARTISTIC achievement...JOSS STONE.