Leona Louise Lewis was born on 3 April 1985, in Islington, London, and when her parents noticed her passion for singing they enrolled her at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, and later at the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts, the Ravenscourt Theatre School and the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology, until they could no longer afford to do so. At the age of 17, Lewis decided to leave the BRIT School to "get out there" and pursue a career in music, and by then she had already begun to write and record her own material. She worked as a receptionist at a solicitor's office and as a Pizza Hut waitress in order to fund the studio sessions, and at age 18 she secured a lead role in The Lion King theatre show in Paris, although she had to withdraw after injuring her back while she was ice-skating. In 2004 she recorded a demo album in collaboration with Spiral Music, a production company based in Fulham, but the resultant 'Twilight' failed to secure her an album deal with any record companies. Another demo album was recorded under license from UEG Entertainment, and it's been claimed that the company spent up to £70,000 trying to launch her career with the 'Best Kept Secret' album, but with no success, although one track from the album, 'Private Party', became a hit on the underground urban music scene in London in 2005. In 2006 Lewis auditioned for the third series of UK talent show The X Factor, singing 'Over The Rainbow' for judges Simon Cowell, Louis Walsh, Sharon Osbourne and guest judge Paula Abdul. She was placed in the 16–24 category, with Cowell as her mentor. Throughout the course of the show, Lewis was compared with artists such as Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and Celine Dion, performing songs by all three of them, and she eventually defeated Ray Quinn to win the competition on 16 December 2006. The prize for winning was a £1 million recording contract with Cowell's record label, Syco Music, and her debut single, a cover of Kelly Clarkson's 'A Moment Like This', was released on 17 December 2006, breaking a world record after being digitally downloaded more than 50,000 times in less than 30 minutes.
The song became the 2006 UK Christmas number one single, and spent four consecutive weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart, as well as being number one in Ireland for six weeks. In February 2007 she signed a £5 million five-album contract in the United States with Clive Davis's record label, J Records, and she began recording tracks for her 'Spirit' album in London, Miami, Los Angeles, New York City and Atlanta. The record was released in November 2007 and entered both the Irish Albums Chart and the UK Albums Chart at number one, becoming the fastest-selling debut album in both countries, and when it was released in other countries in January 2008 it went to number one in New Zealand, Australia, Austria, Germany, South Africa and Switzerland. It was finally released in the US in April 2008, with two additional tracks added to it, and it entered the Billboard 200 at number one, making Lewis the first British artist to reach number one with a debut album. This phenomenal success seemed to most people to have come out of the blue, but in fact she'd been slogging away trying to break into the music scene for some years, and we can hear her first efforts here with her 'Twilight' album from 2004. It's actually lucky that 'Twilight' was never officially released, and if it had been then she would have been booted off The X Factor, as it's stipulated in the rules that contestants must never have released an album under a major record label. In the end it leaked online for a while, but despite fears from insiders at her label that it would affect the release of 'Spirit', this didn't seem to be the case. Obviously you can't compare these songs to the ultra-produced ones on 'Spirit', with their host of co-writers and producers, but the spark is definitely there, and her vocals on these mostly self-composed tracks shows promise for what was to come just a few years later.
Track listing
01 Paradise
02 Twilight
03 Wings
04 Words
05 Fascinated
06 Baby Girl
07 Could You Be The One
08 How Many Times
09 I Can’t Help It
10 Learn To Love You
11 So Deep
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