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COPYRIGHT 2005 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
When Emiliana Torrini was sixteen, and working in a caviar factory in a small town near Reykjavik, she asked a friend to help her record five pop and blues covers for her father on his fiftieth birthday. The friend persuaded Torrini to record some more songs--enough to make an album. They released it themselves--as "a joke," she says--and it became the No. 1 record in Iceland, where Torrini, the daughter of an Italian father and an Icelandic mother, grew up. Her subsequent career as a singer and songwriter has unfolded in a similarly fortuitous way. It almost didn't happen at all. In 1998, when she was twenty-one, she moved to London, where, a year later, One Little Indian, an independent British label, released "Love in the Time of Science"--her first album to reach an international audience. Inevitably, she was compared to Bjork, Iceland's most famous (and equally tiny) female singer. A hazy, overblown production, the record situated Torrini's music uncomfortably between Bjork's florid electronic arias and the nameless, oily tracks that you hear in the lobbies of boutique hotels.
In 2000, Torrini's boyfriend died, and she was mugged in broad daylight on a busy London street. For two...
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