Daniel Powter

• Genre: Adult Alternative
• Daniel Powter Website

About

British Columbia native Daniel Powter has brought stylish anthem-style pop back to the top of the charts. With his idiosyncratic, sometimes caustic voice, this flawed troubadour holds very little back as with his modern take on blue-eyed soul. But this journey to the top began a long time ago. He began his long romance with music at a very young age, as a panacea to his severe dyslexia, a condition that made him feel like a social pariah when he was in school. Powter told a Canadian newspaper in 2006: "At school I'd keep my head down and try not to get beat up, and then I'd get home and music would be like a drug to me." He started playing violin at the age of four, accompanied by mother on piano, but when his teacher told him one day, "Your music is upside down," he knew that it was time to try something else, and decided to try his hand at piano. After lengthy car trips with his mother to see bands like Prince perform in Vancouver, Powter decided to expand his own musical horizons, and began singing in high school bands. But his first real taste of show business came when he was studying music at Grant MacEwan College in Edmonton, Alberta. It was as a student that he recorded his first single. After that everything else paled. Within two years, he dropped out of school and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, hooking up with producer Jeff Dawson. The two developed a rare musical chemistry and soon they were barricaded in Dawson's studio writing songs and crafting their own idiosyncratic vision. Eventually those songs became the basis of Powter's self-titled album--first released in the U.K. and Europe in 2005-- which found the raspy-voiced singer delving deep into his bruised psyche, holding very little back as he sang about everything brief, glancing encounters in "Free Loop" to the druggy altered states of "Jimmy Gets High," underpinning it all with an urbane, minimalist piano that recalls a very young Elton John before the sunglasses and Lurex suits. But the real stand out was "Bad Day" a more acceptable version of the Boomtown Rat's "I Don't Like Mondays." That song rocketed to the top of the French and German charts, and was featured as a montage theme on American Idol,and in an European Coca-Cola commercial. After the release, he toured Europe, performing at the Berlin Live 8 concert in the summer of 2005. The U.S. release of his album Daniel Powter came out in 2006.