Leona Lewis - Pulse (2012)

During 2011 and 2012 sessions continued for Leona Lewis's third studio album, 'Glassheart', and by August 2012 she was able to announce that the lead single from it would be 'Trouble', which was released on 7 October 2012. It entered the UK Singles Chart at number seven, and the album followed in October, debuting at number three in the UK and at number four in Ireland. However, the second single, 'Lovebird', failed to reach the UK top 200 in the absence of radio support, her first release not to chart since the start of her career. In February 2013, Lewis left her management, Modest! Management, and she also announced that she would begin work on her fourth studio album, which would be released later in the year. In July 2013 she revealed that her new studio album would be a "Motown-influenced" Christmas collection, with both classic covers and original material, and 'Christmas, With Love' was released on 2 December 2013, with the lead single, 'One More Sleep', coming out the previous month. Despite having enough unused material to compile an album from 2010, there was an equivalent amount left off 'Glassheart' from the 2011/2012 sessions, and it was enough to put together a companion album to that as well, so for this final post from Leona Lewis we have a collection of outtakes from 2012, along with a guest appearance on a single by Miko Fukuhara, gathered together under the title of 'Pulse'.

Track listing

01 Mr. Magic Touch 

02 A Thousand Lights 

03 Burn

04 Pulse 

05 Piece Of Your Heart  

06 Stay 

07 Burning Down

08 It's All For You

09 Love Killer

10 I Miss You Missing Me  

11 Sugar (bonus track from the Deluxe edition of 'Glassheart)

12 Colorblind (bonus track from the Deluxe edition of 'Glassheart)

13 Playground

14 Save Me (feat. Miko Fukuhara) 

Leona Lewis - Perfection (2010)

The success of her 2009 album 'Echo' had raised Leona Lewis's profile enough for her to be asked to provide vocals on a cover of 'Everybody Hurts', released in January 2010 to help raise money for victims of that year's earthquake in Haiti. Her first tour, titled 'The Labyrinth' supporting 'Spirit' and 'Echo', started in May 2010, and was scheduled to cover North America from July to August supporting Christina Aguilera's Bionic Tour, but Aguilera cancelled, leaving Lewis's plans in limbo. However, a DVD of the UK leg of the tour, along with a ten-track CD, was released with the title 'The Labyrinth Tour Live from The O2' on 29 November 2010. She began work on her third album, 'Glassheart', shortly after she completed 'The Labyrinth' tour, and although originally announced to be released on 28 November 2011 in the UK, it was delayed for a year before it eventually appeared. During 2010 Lewis worked with numerous writers and producers including Ammo, Jonas Quant, Chuck Harmony, Claude Kelly, Ryan Tedder, Fraser T Smith, Al Shux, Steve Robson, Dallas Austin, Rico Love, and Ne-Yo, and a lot of material was recorded for 'Glassheart', but most of it was eventually scrapped, and more sessions took place in 2011 and 2012. In September 2011 she released the dance-pop single 'Collide', written by Autumn Rowe and produced by Sandy Vee, and it debuted on the official UK top 40 singles chart at number 4. She followed this in December 2011 with 'Hurt: The EP', containing four covers, and she closed the year by performing on the American version of X Factor, and as the featured performer for the closing of the 2011 Doha Film Festival, where she sang ten songs. A number of the tracks recorded in 2010 have now surfaced, and so although she didn't release a studio album that year, she certainly had enough material to do so, and so this is what it could have sounded like, with the addition of the 'Collide' single. 

Track listing 

01 Save Myself 
02 How Everything You Are
03 Breaking Into Pieces
04 Crying Is Beautiful
05 The Fabric Of Our Lives
06 I Know Who I Am (from the film 'For Coloured Girls' 2010)
07 I Didn't Want To Hurt You

08 Collide
09 Mountains
10 Can't Fight It   
11 Hero

12 Everybody Hurts
13 Perfection

14 Haunted  

Leona Lewis - Unreachable (2009)

After Leona Lewis won the third series of The X Factor in 2006, her winning song was released as a single on 17 December 2006, and 'A Moment Like This' broke a world record after being digitally downloaded more than 50,000 times in less than 30 minutes, becoming the UK Christmas number-one single for that year. In February 2007 she signed a £5 million five-album contract in the United States with Clive Davis's record label, J Records, with Simon Cowell and Davis working together in a "first-of-its-kind" partnership on both the song and producer selection for Lewis's debut album, 'Spirit'. When the record was released in November 2007 it entered both the Irish Albums Chart and the UK Albums Chart at number one, becoming the fastest-selling debut album in both countries, and the UK's fourth-fastest selling album of all time. Lewis's second single, 'Bleeding Love', produced by Ryan Tedder and written by Tedder and Jesse McCartney, was released in October 2007 in the UK, giving her a second number one single, remaining at the top of the charts for eight weeks. In August 2008, Lewis performed 'Whole Lotta Love' with guitarist Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin at the 2008 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in Beijing, representing the handover to London as the host of the 2012 Summer Olympics. Work on her second album, 'Echo', took place throughout 2009, including work with Ryan Tedder, Justin Timberlake, Max Martin, Arnthor Birgisson, Kevin Rudolf, and John Shanks, and it was recorded in Los Angeles and took nine months to produce. It was released in November 2009, and reached reached number one in the UK Albums Chart, as well as the top ten of Austria, Ireland and Switzerland. She also recorded the theme song for the 2009 science fiction film 'Avatar', with 'I See You' being nominated for Best Original Song at the 67th Golden Globe Awards. The Sessions for 'Echo' produced more recordings than could be included on the album, and in recent years a number of unused tracks have leaked, and there are enough from 2009 alone to make a companion album to 'Echo' from the same time-frame, so here are the best of the 2009 outtakes, including a studio version of 'Whole Lotta Love', the theme from 'Avatar', and one left-over from 'Spirit', so as not to waste 'Stay Tonight'.   

Track listing

01 Scene Of The Crime
02 Drive
03 Stay Tonight
04 Fly Here Now
05 You Don't Care
06 Whole Lotta Love
07 Strangers
08 Let Somebody Love You
09 Nowhere Left To Go (feat. Cassidy)
10 I See You
11 Unreachable
12 Intervention 
13 Perfect Stranger
14 Danger Made Me

Leona Lewis - Twilight (2004)

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