Melodie Crittenden

Take a soulful singer with an amazing and powerful range. Team her up with an ASCAP Songwriter Of The Year, an Emmy award-winning arranger and some of the top pop and country session players in the business, and you get The Woman I Am, the new Melodie Crittenden project.

The Woman I Am is a true collaboration, with Pat Alger co-writing all of the material as well as co-producing the album with Melodie. Brian Siewert provided the string arrangements and conducted the Siewert String Machine. The featured musicians include Liberty DeVitto, David Santos and Crystal Talliefero of the Billy Joel band, as well as Nashville super pickers Pat Buchanan, Gary Burnette, John Gardner, Robert Arthur, Kevin Grant and Tim Lauer. Background vocals were handled by Kim Keyes, Michael Mellett and Melodie.

The material is a hybrid of blue-eyed soul with country and pop influences all co-written by Pat Alger with such notable collaborators as Marc Beeson, Richard Leigh, Wood Newton, Mark Sanders and Melodie herself. Melodie's performances are captured live with all the emotional intensity she has become famous for in Nashville.

Melodie Crittenden has been making quite an impression in Nashville for a while now. Her first self-titled album for Asylum Records yielded the top 30 hit "Broken Road" and in 1998 she was Billboard Magazine's Most Promising New Country Female Artist. In 1999 she toured with pop icon Billy Joel and was part of his "Millennium Celebration" television Broadcast. Melodie has sung with a wide array of artists including Sheryl Crow, Willie Nelson, Neil Diamond and Amy Grant. Like Trisha Yearwood before her, she is a highly sought after demo singer, capable of learning a new song quickly and then singing it like she's known it forever. Melodie also has been quite busy singing on various projects for artists such as Billy Joel, Aaron Tippin, Chad Brock, Blake Shelton, Ty Herndon, Neil Diamond and Iris DeMent. 

[Coyright 2004 Melodie Crittenden]

Out of that meeting, Melodie found a co-writer and eventual producer in Stephony Smith (who wrote Its Your Love for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill). They started writing together and EMI, where both are staff writers, asked Smith to produce some of Melodies work. It turned out so well, so far beyond what either of us had expected, that we all got really excited, Melodie says. This was exactly how I wanted to sound. 

Along the way, Byron Gallimore (Tim McGraw, Randy Travis) was recruited to help with the technical side. The collaboration resulted in a mixture of songs that are heady and stark-raving real. 

Whether its the first single, the gorgeous Marcus Hummon/Bobby E. Boyd/Jeff Hanna Broken Road, which embraces the path that leads us to what we truly want, the sassy Harley Allen/Leslie Winn Satcher Never Underestimate A Bored Housewife, with its stinging guitar and brazen vocal, or the sweeping Austin Cunningham/Melodie Crittenden If This Aint Love, which makes the big picture the bottom line, these songs are played to the hilt and capture the moments that make a strong woman smart. 

Indeed, there's the powerful song of abuse and escape Birmingham, the happy face of survival in This Thing Called Living and the song of love and forgiveness With His Arms Wide Open, that add dimension to a voice that's both wise and fresh. These are songs to be reckoned with, just like the artist. 
She's got a point to make: 

Going through the hills or valleys, its those experiences that shape who you are and in the end, life's to be lived, she says. And hopefully you can give something back. That's why I'm doing this. Its what I wanted -- what I've always wanted -- and now I can make that dream mean something. 

[Author unknown]