Admittedly we’d heard nothing about 21 year old British songstress Sparks until an email dropped into our inbox late last week telling us all about her extraordinary journey.
It began with her writing songs at seven years of age, selling her own CDs at London markets by her early teens, supporting Marina & The Diamonds and bagging a record deal by her late teens.
But it turns out that Sparks (real name Jess Morgan) was a feisty little minx and like a number of artists before her, didn’t like the road the record company wanted her to tread.
“The music they had me making just wasn’t me. I felt like a fake when I performed it and it just didn’t feel right,” she admits in a statement. “The artists that I grew up with and fell in love with – Eminem, Tracey Chapman, Jay Z – have so much passion in their delivery that you know it’s totally honest. And that made me wonder why I was starting my career trying to fulfill someone else’s vision of who I was. It just didn’t make sense.”
So she walked away and ventured on her own path, making the music she wanted with the people she wanted.
“I wanted to work with people that I could be locked in a room for hours or days and be able to sit, talk, create and somehow bring out the best in each other. When people with a shared passion come together…that’s when the best work is created. Masterpieces. Classics.”
The results so far are the tracks ‘Take It Back’ and ‘STRUCK OUT‘ – polished pop numbers infused with oodles of street-wise swag. And though there’s no official release date been given at this stage, we suspect this is one spark that’s ready to catch fire… and soon.
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