Odessa Lune

Odessa Lune writes soul music with the room left in. Her arrangements start from one voice and one instrument and add only what the song will not survive without, which is usually less than a band expects and more than a producer will admit.

She came up singing in her family's church, then spent most of her twenties as a session vocalist, a stretch she describes as a paid apprenticeship in other people's taste. The habit of serving somebody else's record is audible in her own: she sings under the line as often as over it, and leaves the last chorus alone rather than doubling it.

Her first record was cut live across four days to two inch tape, band in one room, no click. Three of the songs are first takes. The mix keeps the count-ins and the chair noise, and that was her decision rather than an accident.

On stage she works with a four piece and no in-ear monitors, which lets the tempo move with the room and puts the arrangements slightly out of reach of the record. Audiences who came for the ballads tend to leave talking about the faster material.

She is writing a second record at a slower pace than the first, and has said she would rather put out nothing for two years than put out something she can already hear the end of.