America belongs to Leona Lewis – and it's mutual
Beyond a catchy tune, you’d be hard-pushed to identify a common quality that propelled Petula Clark, Lulu, Sheena Easton and Kim Wilde into an elite band of chart-topping British females Stateside.
But one thing that can be said about Leona Lewis’s predecessors was that all of them were palpably British affairs. In 2008, the same cannot be said for Bleeding Love. Though raised in Hackney, Lewis has clearly spent the years before her 2006 X-Factor victory in thrall to soaring American balladeers.
Composed by two Americans — the OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder and former boy band member Jesse McCartney — Bleeding Love pays enough lip-service to modern R&B while pushing enough MOR buttons to appeal to both young pop fans and the millions of Americans who once used to buy records by the likes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and, more recently, Kelly Clarkson, by the lorryload.
The latter are still out there. They’ve always been in the market for a song such as Bleeding Love. But with both Houston and Carey currently inactive and American Idol winner Clarkson increasingly at odds with her record company, Lewis couldn’t have come at a better time.
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But one thing that can be said about Leona Lewis’s predecessors was that all of them were palpably British affairs. In 2008, the same cannot be said for Bleeding Love. Though raised in Hackney, Lewis has clearly spent the years before her 2006 X-Factor victory in thrall to soaring American balladeers.
Composed by two Americans — the OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder and former boy band member Jesse McCartney — Bleeding Love pays enough lip-service to modern R&B while pushing enough MOR buttons to appeal to both young pop fans and the millions of Americans who once used to buy records by the likes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey and, more recently, Kelly Clarkson, by the lorryload.
The latter are still out there. They’ve always been in the market for a song such as Bleeding Love. But with both Houston and Carey currently inactive and American Idol winner Clarkson increasingly at odds with her record company, Lewis couldn’t have come at a better time.
continue...
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