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Alannah Myles was born on Christmas Day into a Canadian/Irish family, the second of five children (and the eldest girl). Her father was in broadcasting and advertising; he produced Canada's first radio show and was induced into the Canadian Broadcasting Hall Of Fame. The first music she remembers is the Gregorian-styled Latin chants she heard in church. Alannah spent half of her childhood in Toronto, the other half in Buckhorn in northern Ontario, where her family owns a ranch and where she learned to ride horses. (Years later, she wrote many of the songs for her first album in the "Black Velvet" cabin in Buckhorn.) She wrote her first song at the age of eight - "I was teasing my little sister and wrote a song called ‘Ugly Little Cabbage In The Garden’. Vengeance has fueled my songwriting from day one!" - and continued throughout her teens, writing on her mother's classical guitar. Later, she sold her horse to buy her first Ovation guitar to play in clubs and coffee houses.
Influenced largely by fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen (as well as such artists as Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Ann Peebles, Linda Ronstadt, Donovan, Mavis Staples, Aretha Franklin, Little Feat, The Pretenders and the Stones), Alannah was deterred by her parents from pursuing a musical career. So, quite naturally, she bulled right ahead with one anyway. She began performing solo gigs in Southern Ontario at the age of 18. A couple of years later, she met Christopher Ward and opened for his band; soon, they were in a band together. The group played covers of songs by Aretha Franklin, Bob Seger, and the Pretenders, while also tricking club-owners by claiming Alannah's originals were cover songs. "I'd say ‘Still Got This Thing’ was ZZ Top, ‘Love Is’ was INXS", she laughs. "That's how I got gigs!" Songwriter/producer David Tyson joined Alannah and Christopher a couple of years later, and the group's blueprint for success was complete.
And when success finally came, it came in a big way: the bluesy "Black Velvet", a song suggesting the life and times of Elvis Presley, became an RIAA gold single, and the self-titled album from which it came went platinum in the U.S., double platinum in Australia, platinum in New Zealand, sold over two million copies in Europe, and went ten times platinum in Canada (a "diamond" record), ultimately selling five million units worldwide. The album and/or "Black Velvet" also won three Canadian Juno Awards, while Alannah garnered a Grammy for "Best Rock Female Vocal Performance". She toured for eighteen solid months supporting the album, opening for Robert Plant, Tina Turner and Simple Minds, among others.
"Once, I was performing in front of 120,000 people in Europe, and during ‘Black Velvet’, in the heat of the moment, I stupidly decided to get up on top of a 50-foot stack of speakers. The wind was so strong up there, and I looked out over about a quarter-mile of people, and I nearly passed out", she laughs, "but I didn't, because I was concentrating on remembering the lyrics!"
Alannah's piercing emerald eyes, her natural kinetic energy, and her deep cackle of a laugh all combine to create a personality that is virtually larger than life. At times, her ferocious self-confidence has been perceived as arrogance - a perception that was unavoidably reinforced by a worldwide smash hit record.
"My tongue has always been my deadliest enemy - I sink or swim by it", she says. "I think that all the rejection I received through the years of playing clubs - in a country where there's a lot of great talent with very few record deals to go around - challenged me to be overly confident, and that was misperceived as arrogance. I'm able to explain that now; I couldn't see it then"
As another extremely talented Canadian songstress once said, she's looked at life from both sides now. "I worked until I was near dead", she says, "But when I was my most rich and famous, I was the most unhappy. I had accomplished my dream only to discover a new kind of emptiness."
After touring relentlessly (particularly in Canada and Europe) in support of her last two albums ‘Rocking Horse’ and ‘Alannah’, she moved back to Toronto, "to get back to myself", she says. This period has resulted in the duet with Italian superstar Zucchero called "What Are We Waiting For", featured on the Constantin Films release "Prince Valiant" (Prinz Eisenherz in Germany) which opened in Germany on 300 screens, and received major international exposure.
Alannah's journey has brought her to ARK 21 Records, where her most recent effort, Arival, was released on March 24, 1998 to critical acclaim.
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