terra naomi

Hometown: Los Angeles.

The line-up: Terra Naomi (vocals, guitar, piano), Tyler Hilton (acoustic guitar), Andrew Williams (electric guitar), Davey Faragher (bass), Dorian Crozier (drums, percussion).

The background: It's the punk DIY anyone-can-do-it ethic gone into hyperdrive. Singer-songwriter Naomi is the No 1 most-subscribed-to artist on YouTube (for the record, P Diddy is No 2): she's had five million views (and counting) of her song, Say It's Possible, from her "virtual tour", filmed while she applied for jobs in restaurants. The song's about the end of the world, based on Al Gore's cheery An Inconvenient Truth. There have been 200+ foreign-language covers of it courtesy of besotted fans of all races and creeds from places as far-flung as Spain and China. One even used a sock puppet. Guess what? Terra Naomi is going to be MASSIVE.

Analysis of her DNA reveals traces of boho and goth, although mainly she's a Ballsy Rock Chick with one of those nicotine-stained Ballsy Rock Chick voices, all throaty vibrato and husky disdain - usually for men, or The Man. On her song Up Here, she explains that she's got a tattoo on her arm that she drew when she was bored waiting tables in New York. "Here I am who I am," she croaks, belligerently, "and if you don't like it, then fuck you, man" - which is basically Alanis Morissette's Hand In My Pocket revisited, but still.

Naomi, like Alanis, is a girl with a past, although in this case there's no teen star pre-history. No, her backstory involves filling her face with piercings, her body with tattoos, and her brain with heroin and crack cocaine. She had a stint in rehab, making her the Amy Winehouse Who Saw Sense, or - given her internet fast-track to success - the degenerate Sandi Thom who won't be a one-hit-wonder.

She was born in Saratoga Springs, NY, and raised on a farm. The family moved to Schenectady, NY, the hometown of Naomi's plastic surgeon dad (her mum's a social worker). She studied classical piano and voice, her teachers convincing her to pursue a degree in opera from the University of Michigan. She moved to NYC and began writing songs and playing guitar in clubs. Following a self-booked tour of the US in 2003, she moved to LA to work with producer Paul Fox (XTC, 10,000 Maniacs). Her debut LP is written by Naomi and produced by Fox. It is, as you can imagine, bold and bolshy with baroque string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks and David Campbell, Beck's father. From the political Something Good To Show You - resulting from her contribution to Neil Young's Living With War - to Flesh For Bones, on which she proves she's capable of the Tori-ish soft caress, it's an LP of strums and screams, cries and whispers.

The buzz: "With the look of a young Keith Richards, Terra Naomi is the only girl cool enough to make the cut in the YouTube Awards" - NY Times.

The truth: If you thought Jagged Little Pill was unavoidable in the mid-90s, just wait till Naomi's album takes her from YouTube to ubiquity.

Most likely to: Become the most-heard woman on the planet this summer.

Least likely to: Become a supposed former infatuation junkie - not for a couple of years anyway.

File next to: Alanis Morissette, Joan Osborne, Alannah Myles, Sheryl Crow.

What to buy: Terra Naomi's debut album will be released by Island this summer. - The Guardian

Hometown: Los Angeles.

The line-up: Terra Naomi (vocals, guitar, piano), Tyler Hilton (acoustic guitar), Andrew Williams (electric guitar), Davey Faragher (bass), Dorian Crozier (drums, percussion).

The background: It's the punk DIY anyone-can-do-it ethic gone into hyperdrive. Singer-songwriter Naomi is the No 1 most-subscribed-to artist on YouTube (for the record, P Diddy is No 2): she's had five million views (and counting) of her song, Say It's Possible, from her "virtual tour", filmed while she applied for jobs in restaurants. The song's about the end of the world, based on Al Gore's cheery An Inconvenient Truth. There have been 200+ foreign-language covers of it courtesy of besotted fans of all races and creeds from places as far-flung as Spain and China. One even used a sock puppet. Guess what? Terra Naomi is going to be MASSIVE.

Analysis of her DNA reveals traces of boho and goth, although mainly she's a Ballsy Rock Chick with one of those nicotine-stained Ballsy Rock Chick voices, all throaty vibrato and husky disdain - usually for men, or The Man. On her song Up Here, she explains that she's got a tattoo on her arm that she drew when she was bored waiting tables in New York. "Here I am who I am," she croaks, belligerently, "and if you don't like it, then fuck you, man" - which is basically Alanis Morissette's Hand In My Pocket revisited, but still.

Naomi, like Alanis, is a girl with a past, although in this case there's no teen star pre-history. No, her backstory involves filling her face with piercings, her body with tattoos, and her brain with heroin and crack cocaine. She had a stint in rehab, making her the Amy Winehouse Who Saw Sense, or - given her internet fast-track to success - the degenerate Sandi Thom who won't be a one-hit-wonder.

She was born in Saratoga Springs, NY, and raised on a farm. The family moved to Schenectady, NY, the hometown of Naomi's plastic surgeon dad (her mum's a social worker). She studied classical piano and voice, her teachers convincing her to pursue a degree in opera from the University of Michigan. She moved to NYC and began writing songs and playing guitar in clubs. Following a self-booked tour of the US in 2003, she moved to LA to work with producer Paul Fox (XTC, 10,000 Maniacs). Her debut LP is written by Naomi and produced by Fox. It is, as you can imagine, bold and bolshy with baroque string arrangements by Van Dyke Parks and David Campbell, Beck's father. From the political Something Good To Show You - resulting from her contribution to Neil Young's Living With War - to Flesh For Bones, on which she proves she's capable of the Tori-ish soft caress, it's an LP of strums and screams, cries and whispers.

The buzz: "With the look of a young Keith Richards, Terra Naomi is the only girl cool enough to make the cut in the YouTube Awards" - NY Times.

The truth: If you thought Jagged Little Pill was unavoidable in the mid-90s, just wait till Naomi's album takes her from YouTube to ubiquity.

Most likely to: Become the most-heard woman on the planet this summer.

Least likely to: Become a supposed former infatuation junkie - not for a couple of years anyway.

File next to: Alanis Morissette, Joan Osborne, Alannah Myles, Sheryl Crow.

What to buy: Terra Naomi's debut album will be released by Island this summer. - The Guardian

Full list of press scans on www.terranaomi.com - www.terranaomi.com

Srinagar: Often at loggerheads with due to their ideology, separatists and mainstream leaders were seen together at a platform thanks to environmental degradation and fast changing climate.

At a musical evening held here on the banks of Dal Lake starring US Pop singer Terra Naomi, Jammu and Kashmir Tourism minister Nawang Rigzin Jora, minister of state for tourism Naser Aslam Wani and JKLF Chairman Mohammad Yaseen Malik and his colleagues were seen sitting in the first row.

US pop singer Terra Naomi urged the world leaders meeting at Copenhagen in the world summit on climate change to take strong note of Kashmir's changing climate.

The Pop star sung "Say its possible", the song, which won her YouTube Music Award, for Kashmir's melting glaciers. Dressed in a Kashmiri gown with embroidery, Terra performed along with local artists.

"Why I am in Kashmir is because this is where climate change effects could be felt. This is where it is happening," she said. - Zeenews.com (India)

Srinagar: Often at loggerheads with due to their ideology, separatists and mainstream leaders were seen together at a platform thanks to environmental degradation and fast changing climate.

At a musical evening held here on the banks of Dal Lake starring US Pop singer Terra Naomi, Jammu and Kashmir Tourism minister Nawang Rigzin Jora, minister of state for tourism Naser Aslam Wani and JKLF Chairman Mohammad Yaseen Malik and his colleagues were seen sitting in the first row.

US pop singer Terra Naomi urged the world leaders meeting at Copenhagen in the world summit on climate change to take strong note of Kashmir's changing climate.

The Pop star sung "Say its possible", the song, which won her YouTube Music Award, for Kashmir's melting glaciers. Dressed in a Kashmiri gown with embroidery, Terra performed along with local artists.

"Why I am in Kashmir is because this is where climate change effects could be felt. This is where it is happening," she said. - Zeenews.com (India)

If you paid close attention to Live Earth last month you may just have spotted, squeezed on to the Wembley bill somewhere amid Madonna’s theatrics, Metallica’s heavy metal and Ricky Gervais’s bad gags, a young woman called Terra Naomi. Armed only with a guitar and a nervous smile, the American singer took to the stage to perform one song, Say it’s Possible, at the personal invitation of Al Gore, her lyrics having been inspired by his film about eco-apocalypse. The tune had already been a huge hit on YouTube, clocking up five million views, but she was still an unknown compared with the other artists. Yet nobody in the Wembley audience was as amazed to see her there as her dad.

Her father, a plastic surgeon, had flown over from the US with her brothers especially, unable quite to believe this was the same daughter whom he had dragged from the crack houses of Detroit into rehab. What’s even stranger is that she became a drug addict while training as an opera singer at a music college in Michigan. By day she was learning Britten arias; by night, she was “a dealer and a junkie, sticking needles into my arms 15 times”, as she puts it.

Sitting in a pub near the Brighton church venue where she will perform that night, Naomi relates such stories breezily – though she is obviously horrified by her own past. Naomi is strangely cute, and time passes quickly in her company.

“Someone at my record label was talking about crazy rock’n’roll behaviour the other day, and I was like: ‘I was doing that s*** when I was singing opera; that’s rock’n’roll man!’ Everyone in the crack houses was high and I’d sing for these prostitutes. They’d be like: ‘What did you do today?’ and I’d say: ‘I sang in an opera’, and they’d say: ‘What’s opera?’ So I would just start singing.” She laughs and curls her skinny limbs around herself. “I think I gave them some very bad dreams.” After her turnaround, Naomi is now a fully fledged rock-pop singer and about to release her debut album, Under the Influence, through Island, home of Amy Winehouse. She sees something of her younger self in her labelmate, and recalls attending a Winehouse gig “with the head of our label and his wife, sitting up in this little VIP section, and Amy’s whole family was there. I’m really close to my dad and I guess it really hit me because of what I’d been through, and because we are both daddy’s girls. Knowing that my dad was the one who watched me on stage but also the one who picked me up off the floor and put me in the car and drove me to detox. She did put on a good show, but she looked like she was having problems, and seeing her dad have to watch that ... It was just sad, really sad.”

Not that Naomi has much truck with the celebrity rehab craze, having done hers the hard way. She is concerned that luxury rest homes for “exhausted” celebrities do nobody any good. “When I went it was to an emergency detox hospital for crackheads in upstate New York, because my body was so ruined, and then rehab was a month on a hospital wing – I think I was the only one who wasn’t court-ordered to be there. The other women were really f***ed: ten kids, no teeth, the lowest of the low. They made me scrub toilets and I know they’re not doing that in the Priory; they’re riding horses and having massage. I think that’s why rehab worked for me – it was so disgusting that, my God, the thought of going back. . .

“I was using drugs in the ghetto of Detroit and there was nothing cool about it. There were guns. The situations I was in were life-threatening.” How she got into such a state she isn’t sure, as she claims she had a decent childhood with a nice middle-class family. She just always felt like an outsider, the sort of kid who hung out on their own wearing black and writing morose poetry, and her determined streak led her to wanton self-destruction. Even when studying opera, she made friends with people in rock bands, and so after quitting the drugs she also quit opera. “I knew classical music wasn’t really for me – I didn’t have the discipline or the love.”

Her music now is much more like that of Alanis Morissette, with first-person confessional lyrics. Though it sounds commercial on record, live, it is clear why she has been booked as a support act for the idiosyncratic Martha Wainwright. They both have rich, soaring voices and a deep well of life material on which to draw.

At the Live Earth gig, Naomi was even more determined to enjoy every second on stage, as the drugs had made her so numb for so many years. “So I thought, I really want to know what it’s like to stand in a stadium singing in front of 75,000 people and then millions more on TV. It was completely overwhelming and surreal at the same time. I still don’t really believe that it happened.” The month before she had been playing to 100 people in Camden.

Such is the power of Al Gore’s personal support. She saw An Inconvenient Truth while she was working as a bored waitress in New York. “The next day I - The Times (London)