 How on any one earth can a single woman achieve such grace, such depths of sadness and breath-wrenching heights of joy, renewed album after album the way Heather Nova very often does?
Is it just me or should not everyone with an ear for beauty, snatched like rays from the prism of light of someone's soul and distilled into songs of such varied hues, be almost at her feet? We're borne away from our mundane lives like sailors content to leave the known lands behind and float adrift on ever changing seas where there are still dreamed beasts and enchanted islands ruled by strange divinities.
During some tempestuous times these past months, I've often weighed anchor myself to explore one or another of these CDs and can only think that others may already feel that 'Siren' got the name because Heather is one, with such a voice, or headlined some attempt to write about her with the one word "supernova"! What else?
Heather Nova has a huge following already, so maybe I move in less musically broad though very international circles than I'd imagined if quite a lot of people still say "Who's she?" Well, the deceptively frail-looking artist originally from Bermuda is one of several lyric poets or singers so good they're just heart-breaking. Also, I'd have asked the same of some not so long ago myself. Now they're people it will take weeks to get to know well, which doesn't stop me posting some pictures and broad remarks.
Several reviewers speak of Heather's apparent fragility, but she can whip up a tempest with a driving rock song before donning angel's wings (I suppose, having not yet seen her) to follow that with a seraphic near solo, as the live album 'Blow' (1998) attests ... or later 'Wonderlust'.
One poor guy, in brief comment at that habitual Amazon UK record link, thinks she's "outrageous" because she keeps on "abducting people to other worlds" -- and the bemused Oswald Mürner of Zurich is right, she does. In that Vienna concert shot (up top; uncredited but in 2002), Heather's quite probably looking for the next planet to land on.
 During the catching-up period -- my euphemistic term for reckless acquisitions in bulk on realising just what's out there -- several Nova albums went on to the shelves, as did music from Beth Orton (the Lincolnshire lass of the stark, direct gaze).
With Emiliana Torrini (pictured below in inner space), one surprise was finding she comes from Iceland, just like Björk, which doesn't lend itself to guesswork until you pay considerable attention to her accent ... and even then.
The other poet-singer is Chantal Kreviazuk and her sense of 'Colour Moving and Still', when she in 2000 did some 'Soul Searching', went 'Blue' and got many people moved by her 'Little Things'.
At a wild guess, Nova's names for albums such as 'Oyster', 'Storm' and 'South' could also be descriptions of Heather herself depending where her spirit is and how expansive or intimate her words and music are. Unless you cheat, you can't tell what you're in for until you've arrived: it can be sparing and acoustic, a thread of some sweet fancy, occasionally she's almost got an orchestra or conjures up choirs and then she's got you dancing your buttons undone. You can only tell she is from Planet Earth because some of her tales of love or fantasy or grief sound like your very own.
Beth Orton (Astralwerks; a Flash "launchpad", beware browser misbehaviour) made a reputation with albums titled for places of transition, whether it's life in 'Trailer Park' or stuck on the 'Central Reservation', both soon to to be reissued as one, which makes for excellent company. Her lyrics may be more immediately earthbound than some by the other singers here, but her outlook is no less poetic when our boldest fancies can be nurtured in the grittiest of places to unleash imagination.
I've been relishing Emiliana Torrini's 'Fisherman's Woman' so secretly for months -- it was released in January -- that she's another musician who sent me searching backwards through her career for more, to be bowled over by 'Love in the Time of Science' (1999), a splendid title that says a little of the content, where even 'Telepathy' makes for some surprisingly close contact and grows naturally from the song before it, sometimes almost to explode in your head.
 Did you know Emiliana did her bit in the 'Lord of the Rings' films? To believe what she says at her place, she almost went out of her way to avoid actually having to give us a second album in six years. After everything she packed into the first, it's scarcely astonishing. She can slip from a sunny, carefree loving to the darkness of stormclouds as swiftly as some Nordic deity chucking thunderbolts around just for the fun of it.
When I win some lottery by finding a lost ticket, one of the first things I shall do is find out whether the far-reaching Kreviazuk made up her mind on asking, in 2003, 'What if It All Means Something.'
 I imagine that while she may sing her way down more winding trails, strewing delicate flowers as she goes, if music comes into it her original diversions do end up somewhere people can recognise each other and it does mean something.
I've written virtually nothing of songs themselves because I prefer to focus on the sharing of poetry, which is in some cases more "difficult" than others and takes several hearings to get into before words and music take deep root right back in you, cutting to the very quick of our own emotions and experiences.
The heartbreak factor is frequently in the sublime voices of such singers as well as the light or heavy matter of their lyrics, which would be distressingly intimate almost if they weren't so very good at helping you know how you feel about a thing or two.
In this, they and many others shine into the darkest recesses of our own lives when the songs don't share the bright times that come with love and funny secrets shared. Listening to such women reminds me why the focus here is on the girls rather than the guys -- it's not just a question of lust for looks or an only too human hand across the sex divide, if such there is, but the way they say things.
We blokes feel those things too, but for a multitude of reasons I was prone to include in my ramblings of yore, are usually less good at saying them -- let alone singing our poor hearts out, in public. Twice in a row, I've read some standard questions thrown at up-and-coming lads by one music rag that sought tediously routine answers on priorities such as which football team really has God on its side or should have if they're to be happy, and if they want to be millionaires when they're rolling in muck already.
Crass generalisation, I know, but never mind; the women don't.
It's also only women who have mailed me expressions of regret I've stopped logging my own life and adventures of all natures. These dainty souls are particularly objectionable with their protests because if they go on like that, though extremely few in number, I'll probably crack again and start issuing further sermons, soliloquies and stupidities you'll all live to regret even more.
So please pack it in, you adorable lovelies, and listen perhaps to Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' rather than chipping away at the bricks in mine.
You never know what might come out. Enough did already what with my own soul-searching, culminating in an experience you got told about anyway, though very few people seem to understand what happened to me. Why should they since I haven't yet myself? That will take months, maybe years.
Hence you have the poets, women wordsmiths so gifted with their pens and tongues and ears for the right note they each set us afloat on their own oceans or lift the whole lot of us out of our private spaces and time to fly us so far away we come to that strange place where they can surely sing: "This is me, then, and I might be you. Now let us sing together."
Such people are in themselves true gifts. I know, I'm waxing philosophical, and this I don't wish to do because events have somehow come together of late that make me feel older and somehow sadder and also sometimes happier at the same time, so instead of thought each of my days begins with meditation where the insights and ideas seem to come from nowhere and I like it that way.
One terrible truth is that the big five-oh is rushing up on me and I'd quite like to feel fairly sure I may have got somewhere when it hits, so I can look back to see a sense of direction and forward just to see a bit of sense at all. Was that intimate enough?
I don't recall which of these singers was on the iPod the other day when I was in the M and saw a very physical angel. This angel in the M was unusual. Quite apart from being one of the very prettiest women I have ever seen, a natural straw-head blonde with bright grey-green eyes and without any ornamentation or need for it, she smiled two or three times, not to anyone but herself, completely privately in sardine-can public.
She was simply dressed, in a black T-shirt, jeans and trainers, and when she got off, she did a profile check of herself in the door windows of the train at that moment they're still mirrors before becoming neon-glaring densely populated platforms. And smiled again.
She'd got just to that secret age many women have when some quiet confidence starts making each of their life's touching little scars all the lovelier.
It was quick, just fleeting instants, but during them I thought to myself: "That mind completely inhabits that body, they are one, she is beautiful, knows it without pretension and is happy right now. She is music at this moment, nothing else." As was the graceful way she then slipped past everybody else and rushed up the steps perhaps to whatever or whoever it was that had given her those smiles, leaving me to my soundscape shaped by somebody else's fantasy.
That was a wonderful snippet of intimate perfection somehow shared; perhaps the woman knew, perhaps she didn't. That's exactly what the singers do, not always perfectly, but never mind that: they give to us of their intimacy to let us make it our own, we becomes selves almost mirrored in sound, never true mirrors since they're each unique, as everybody has to learn to be in the end.
If you suffered through those observations -- I'll name no names of kind people who are rattling my cage -- then you'll know why you're better off listening to any one of these women than reading any of my waffle. Some poet-singers I shall write about more one day when I do know them better, but they enrich my life immeasurably as it is. They also make it easy when it comes to that revolting task of trying to tell you what kind of music they do: rock, blues, class .... forget it. They don't.
Some call their kind Absolute Divas, which -- like other sites that usually do the women justice rather than being showrooms for critical egos -- is now on the blogroll. I'm also often at Auralgasms since I appreciate the way one "auralgasm" leads to another ... until I remember I have a wishlist, not a wad in a wallet.
These women are among an ever larger bunch on my iTunes and iPod that has but one genre all its own: singer-songwriter. Some started out listed by type, then moved there instead. All have their own web sites, so you can can make up your own mind what type they are. If you succeed, congratulations.
I haven't.
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