KT Tunstall

Born in 1975, Scottish singer/songwriter KT (an alternate spelling of Katie) comes from the quaint university town of St. Andrews. Due in part by being adopted at birth, her imagination and creative side flourished from an early age as she thought about how her life could have gone in any given direction. As she was growing up, her physicist father would take Tunstall and her brothers into the St. Andrews observatory to look at the sky, fuelling her youthful love for space and sci-fi. It wasn't until discovering hair metal through her brother that music really started to become important to her.

Tunstall picked up playing piano and flute at a young age and learnt to sing by listening to Ella Fitzgerald. She began writing her own songs in her mid-teens. At 16, she taught herself the guitar and continued to hone her writing skills with sentimental love songs. A scholarship to the Kent School, a private prep school in Connecticut, brought her experiences of the world outside of Scotland. She formed her first band, the Happy Campers, and enjoyed seeing shows by 10,000 Maniacs and the Grateful Dead. Next came a music course at London's Royal Holloway College, before she headed back to Scotland to immerse herself in the local grassroots scene that birthed bands like the Fence Collective and the Beta Band.

KT returned to London and began writing more songs, many of which would appear on her subsequent album. She entered a Wiltshire studio with minimal instruments in tow and Steve Osborne (U2, New Order) at the controls. The end result was her glossy debut, Eye to the Telescope, released in the UK in January 2005. Highlighting her soulful voice, sassy attitude, and earthy songwriting approach, comparisons to Dido, Fiona Apple, and Kate Melua soon sparked. Following the record's release, Tunstall toured all over Europe, including shows supporting Joss Stone and singing with Oi Va Voi. Feeling an acoustic guitar was sometimes too limiting, her live show incorporated the use of an Akai Headrush foot pedal that allowed her to spot-record multiple times (loop each section continuously), turning Tunstall into her own one-woman backup band.