Brandi Carlile is an American singer and songwriter. Carlile’s music has been categorized in several genres including pop, rock, alternative country and folk.
Columbia Records signed Carlile in late 2004 on the strength of songs she’d been recording periodically at home. Released in 2005, Brandi Carlile showcased those early songs along with several newly recorded tracks. Along with the Hanseroth brothers, forming the core of her band today, Brandi spent the better part of two years on the road honing the songs that would later become part of her album “The Story”.
Her second album, The Story, was released in April 2007. It was produced by T Bone Burnett and includes a collaboration with the Indigo Girls on “Cannonball.” The album was recorded in an eleven-day-long session with Carlile , the twins (Tim and Phil Hanseroth) and drummer Matt Chamberlain to capture the raw intensity of Carlile’s live performances. The crack in Carlile’s vocals during the title track, “The Story”, came out by accident and was a direct result of the way the album was recorded. Carlile herself describes the vocals as “technically wrong but emotionally right.”

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known by her stage name Nina Simone, was a fifteen-time Grammy Award-nominated american singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician; She personally preferred the term “black classical music”. Simone originally aspired to become a classical pianist, but her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles besides her classical basis, such as jazz, soul, folk, rnb, gospel, and pop music. Her vocal style (with an alto vocal range) is characterized by intense passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Sometimes known as the High Priestess of Soul, she paid great attention to the musical expression of emotions. Within one album or concert she could fluctuate between exuberant happiness or tragic melancholy. These fluctuations also characterized her own personality and personal life, worsened by a bipolar disorder with which she was diagnosed in the mid-sixties, but was kept secret until 2004