INTRODUCING SPARK
Take It Back:
https://soundcloud.com/sparkthemusic/take-it-back
Struck Out:
https://soundcloud.com/sparkthemusic/struck-out-explicit-final-wav
Set: https://soundcloud.com/sparkthemusic/sets/spark-take-it-back-struck-out
Raised in Walthamstow, Jess “Spark” Morgan wrote her first song at 7 years old and, by the age of 13, was selling her own songs on CD at Walthamstow Market.
Skip forward a few years and Spark, as she is now known, finds herself on tour with Marina and the Diamonds, signed to a label and recording her first album with collaborators including Mike Skinner. But during this time, which should have been full of heady optimism, there appeared a ghost in the machine which kept calling louder and louder as the recording progressed…
“The music they had me making just wasn’t me. I felt like a fake when I performed it and it just didn’t feel right. The artists that I grew up with and fell in love with – Eminem, Tracey Chapman, Jay Z, have so much passion in their delivery that you know it’s totally honest. And that made me wonder why I was starting my career trying to fulfill someone else’s vision of who I was. It just didn’t make sense”.
So she quite simply walked away to write on her own – and, for such a febrile imagination, what she was going through at such a young age in an industry notoriously ambiguous in its treatment of young female artists, was to prove cathartic and ultimately hugely productive.
And here, at 21, we have Spark finally ready to release her music on her own terms. She says “I wanted to work with people that I could be locked in a room for hours or days and be able to sit, talk, create and somehow bring out the best in each other. When people with a shared passion come together…that’s when the best work is created. Masterpieces. Classics.”
And classics is exactly what her new material contains – by the bucket load. Spark’s incredible voice soars through RnB tinged future-hits, with melodies so catchy that the likes of Rihanna, Beyonce and Gwen Stefani would kill for them. But make no mistake, this is no polished, over-produced, over-wrought cynical pop record, rather this is an album of unapologetic and utterly exciting music showcasing Spark’s diversity and ambition. She’s fought to get here and there is now everything to play for. This is serious.
Spark said: “I realised that it doesn’t matter who’s around you, who loves you and supports you, you have to get up and go get it yourself…I’m doing it now. This time I’m not stopping for anyone.”