Gwyneth Herbert

British singer and songwriter Gwyneth Herbert is known for her dusky vocal style and broad-minded blend of jazz, folk, and pop. She first garnered widespread attention when her cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," off her 2004 debut Bittersweet and Blue, was featured in the romantic comedy Leap Year. She has continued to explore a wide array of projects, including working in musical theater. While her early work was primarily centered on interpreting jazz standards, she has increasingly focused on more conceptual original material, as on 2013's sea shanty- and cabaret-inspired The Sea Cabinet and 2018's communication-themed Letters I Haven't Written. Born in 1981 in Wimbledon, London, Herbert was raised in Surrey and Hampshire, where she started playing piano at age three. She eventually learned the French horn and participated in her school bands and local youth orchestra. By her teens, she was writing her own songs and even briefly formed a punk band. After high school, she studied music at Alton College in Hampshire, where she gravitated towards jazz. While she finished her studies at St. Chad's College, University of Durham, Herbert began writing and performing in a duo called Black Coffee with classmate and guitarist Will Rutter. After college, the pair moved to London and released their debut album, First Songs, in 2003. A mix of originals and standards, the set garnered critical attention and radio airplay. In 2004, Herbert issued her debut solo album, Bittersweet and Blue, on the Universal Classics and Jazz label. Along with originals by Herbert and Rutter, it found her covering jazz standards and modern favorites by Crowded House and Tom Waits. Featured on the record was her rendition of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," which gained wider popularity after it was included on the soundtrack to the romantic comedy Leap Year. For her sophomore long-player, Herbert left Universal and independently recorded a handful of original songs that she issued in 2006 as Between Me and the Wardrobe on her own Monkeywood Records. The album was re-released that same year on Blue Note Records. In 2008, Herbert was commissioned by the Bowers & Wilkins audio company and Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios to record an album of original songs that was released on the Bowers & Wilkins site as Ten Lives. The following year, she issued All the Ghosts, which featured remixed versions of songs off Ten Lives. The EP Clangers and Mash, produced by Polar Bear's Seb Rochford, arrived in 2010. Herbert expanded into theater around this time, eventually co-creating six musicals. In 2010, she won the Stiles and Drewe Song of the Year Award with her composition "Lovely London Town" from her musical The A-Z of Mrs P, which she wrote with playwright Diane Samuels. She also wrote the one-act musical Before the Law and composed the music for the musical Le Tabou, based on the writings of Boris Vian. Following a commission by the Snape Maltings artist complex, she recorded her fifth album, The Sea Cabinet. A song cycle and theater piece, it featured collaborations with vocalist Fiona Bevan and found Herbert drawing inspiration from sea shanties, Weimar Republic cabaret, and English music-hall traditions. In support of the album, she staged theatrical performances of The Sea Cabinet at Wilton's Music Hall in London. In 2018, Herbert released her sixth solo album, Letters I Haven't Written, which found her exploring themes of communication and storytelling, as well as the need for people to connect with each other. Included on the record was her song "Not the Kind of Girl," which she had written for a 2010 screening of Marion Davies' 1928 silent film The Patsy at BFI Southbank's Birds Eye View Film Festival. She then returned to her theater work, helping to stage and appear in a 2018 and 2019 production of A Christmas Carol for Bristol's Old Vic.
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