Starry Eyed

Starry Eyed starts with about four seconds of Ellie Goulding alone with a loop and her voice, and in those four seconds you already know something is different. The tone is cool and slightly unsettled, like a melody that hasn’t decided yet whether it’s happy or not. Then the drums come in and the song commits, and for three minutes you’re somewhere between a folk record and a club track and somehow it feels like neither.

She’s twenty-three, from Hereford—the kind of provincial English city that people leave—and taught herself guitar as a teenager before discovering electronic production and understanding that her voice could live in both worlds. She signed with Polydor after Under the Sheets came out on the indie label Neon Gold Records, toured with Little Boots, and by early 2010 her name is everywhere in British music writing. The debut album, Lights, is a few weeks away.

There’s something about her voice that sits in an uncomfortable register—high and airy but with actual body to it, never quite the falsetto-for-effect thing that gets used to signal emotion. She sounds like she means it without performing meaning it, which is harder to pull off than it looks. The folk instincts give her pop production something to push against. The electronic production keeps the folk instincts from going precious.

She’ll go on to be enormous—the kind of enormous that means you hear her at weddings and in supermarkets, and her name becomes almost too familiar to actually hear. But in January 2010, before all that, there’s just this girl with a guitar she taught herself to play, some songs she wrote alone, and a voice that sounds like it wandered in from somewhere slightly outside the known world and decided to stay.

I wrote her name in my notebook when I first heard Starry Eyed. I do that sometimes when something sounds like it’s going to matter.