Goddesses of Music

Björk Guðmundsdóttir is an Icelandic singer, songwriter, composer, record producer, and actress. Noted for her distinct three-octave vocal range and eccentric persona, she has developed an eclectic musical style over her four-decade career that has drawn on electronic, pop, experimental, trip hop, classical, and avant-garde music.

Hope Sandoval & The Warm Inventions are an independent alternative/dream pop band composed of Hope Sandoval from the band Mazzy Star and Colm Ó Cíosóig of My Bloody Valentine. Their first studio album, Bavarian Fruit Bread, was released on October 23, 2001. Alan Browne, from Irish band Dirt Blue Gene, played bass and co-wrote several songs on the album. Through the Devil Softly was released on September 29, 2009, and was recorded with Dirt Blue Gene. Their third album, Until the Hunter, was released on November 4, 2016. Its first single, "Isn't It True", was released on 7" vinyl as part of Record Store Day 2016. A second single, "Let Me Get There" featuring Kurt Vile, was released on September 23.

Anohni (born Antony Hegarty; 24 October 1971), styled as ANOHNI, is an English-born singer, composer, and visual artist. She was formerly the lead singer of the band Antony and the Johnsons.

Anohni was born in Chichester, England. Her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1981. In 1990, she moved to Manhattan, New York to study at the Experimental Theater Wing at New York University, and in 1992 she founded the performance art collective Blacklips with Johanna Constantine.

She started her musical career performing with an ensemble of NYC musicians as Antony and the Johnsons. Their first album, Antony and the Johnsons, was released in 2000 on David Tibet's label Durtro. Their second album, I Am a Bird Now (2005), was a commercial and critical success, earning her the Mercury Music Prize.

Mazzy Star is an American alternative rock band formed in 1988 in Santa Monica, California, from remnants of the group Opal. Founding member David Roback's friend Hope Sandoval became the group's vocalist when Kendra Smith left Opal.

Mazzy Star is best known for the song "Fade into You", which brought the band some success in the mid-1990s and was the group's biggest mainstream hit, earning extensive exposure on MTV, VH1, and radio airplay. Roback and Sandoval were the creative center of the band, with Sandoval as lyricist and Roback as composer of the majority of the band's material until his death in Los Angeles on February 24, 2020, from metastatic cancer.

The band's most recent studio album, Seasons of Your Day, was released in 2013, followed by the EP Still in 2018.

Hope Sandoval is an American singer-songwriter who is the lead singer of Mazzy Star and Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions. Sandoval has toured and collaborated with other artists, including Massive Attack, for whom she sang "Paradise Circus" on the 2010 album Heligoland and the 2016 single "The Spoils".

Patricia Lee Smith (born December 30, 1946) is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses.

Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song is "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five in the UK. In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

On November 17, 2010, Smith won the National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids. The book fulfilled a promise she had made to her former long-time partner, Robert Mapplethorpe. She placed 47th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of 100 Greatest Artists published in December 2010 and was also a recipient of the 2011 Polar Music Prize.

Out of Season is a studio album by vocalist Beth Gibbons and bassist Paul Webb. It was released on 28 October 2002 in the United Kingdom and on 7 October 2003 in the United States. Out of Season is largely a folk album with jazz leanings, with Gibbons and Webb drawing more directly on the influences of Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, and Nick Drake, at which Portishead's work in trip hop only hinted. Out of Season also features contributions from Gibbons' fellow Portishead bandmate Adrian Utley and Webb's former bandmate Lee Harris. The first track of the album, "Mysteries", appears on the original soundtrack of the French movie Les Poupées Russes, and in Wim Wenders' Palermo Shooting from 2008. The album achieved a silver certification from the BPI.

Tori Amos is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She is a classically trained musician with a mezzo-soprano vocal range. Having already begun composing instrumental pieces on piano, Amos won a full scholarship to the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University at the age of five, the youngest person ever to have been admitted. She had to leave at the age of eleven when her scholarship was discontinued for what Rolling Stone described as "musical insubordination". Amos was the lead singer of the short-lived 1980s pop group Y Kant Tori Read before achieving her breakthrough as a solo artist in the early 1990s. Her songs focus on a broad range of topics, including sexuality, feminism, politics, and religion.

Beth Gibbons (born 4 January 1965) is an English singer and songwriter. She is the singer and lyricist for the band Portishead, who have released three albums. She released an album with Rustin Man, Out of Season, in 2002, followed by an album with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2019.

Gibbons was born in Exeter, Devon, England and raised on a farm with three sisters. Her parents divorced when she was young. At 22, she moved to Bath, then Bristol to pursue her singing career, where she met Geoff Barrow, her future collaborator in Portishead.

With Adrian Utley, Gibbons and Barrow released the first Portishead album Dummy in 1994 and have produced two other studio albums, a live album, and various singles in the years since.

Shuhada Sadaqat (born Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor on 8 December 1966; ) is an Irish singer-songwriter. Her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, was released in 1987 and charted internationally. Her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got received glowing reviews upon release and became her biggest success, selling over seven million copies worldwide. Its lead single, "Nothing Compares 2 U" (written by Prince), was named the number one world single in 1990 by the Billboard Music Awards.

She has released ten studio albums: 1992's Am I Not Your Girl? and 1994's Universal Mother both went gold in the UK, 2000's Faith and Courage received gold status in Australia, and 2005's Throw Down Your Arms went gold in Ireland. Her work also includes songs for films, collaborations with many other artists, and appearances at charity fundraising concerts. Her 2021 memoir Rememberings was a best seller.

Polly Jean Harvey is an English singer, songwriter, and musician. Primarily known as a vocalist and guitarist, she is also proficient with a wide range of instruments.

Julee Ann Cruise (December 1, 1956 – June 9, 2022) was an American singer, songwriter and actress, best known for her collaborations with composer Angelo Badalamenti and film director David Lynch in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She released four albums beginning with 1989's Floating into the Night.

Cruise is best known for her 1989 single "Falling"; an instrumental version was used as the theme song for the television series Twin Peaks in which she appeared in a recurring role as a roadhouse singer. She reprised the role in the 1992 movie Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (which also featured her music), and in the 2017 revival series Twin Peaks: The Return. She was also featured in Lynch and Badalamenti's avant-garde 1990 theater production Industrial Symphony No. 1, which was filmed and released on home media.

Fiona Apple McAfee-Maggart is an American singer-songwriter. She has released five albums from 1996 to 2020, which have all reached the top 20 on the U.S. Billboard 200 chart. Apple has received numerous awards and nominations, including three Grammy Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, and a Billboard Music Award.

Charlotte Lucy Gainsbourg is a British-French actress and singer. She is the daughter of English actress Jane Birkin and French musician Serge Gainsbourg. After making her musical debut with her father on the song "Lemon Incest" at the age of 12, she released an album with her father at the age of 15. More than 20 years passed before Gainsbourg released albums as an adult to commercial and critical success. She has also appeared in many films, including the "Depression" trilogy directed by Lars von Trier, and has received a César Award and the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award.

Catherine Bush (born 30 July 1958) is an English singer, songwriter, record producer and dancer. In 1978, at the age of 19, she topped the UK Singles Chart for four weeks with her debut single "Wuthering Heights", becoming the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song. Bush has since released 25 UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", "Babooshka", "Running Up That Hill", "Don't Give Up" (a duet with Peter Gabriel) and "King of the Mountain". All ten of her studio albums reached the UK Top 10, with all but one reaching the top five, including the UK number one albums Never for Ever (1980), Hounds of Love (1985) and the greatest hits compilation The Whole Story (1986). She was the first British solo female artist to top the UK album charts and the first female artist to enter the album chart at number one.

The Plastic Ono Band was a rock band formed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono in 1969 for their collaborative and solo projects based on their 1968 Fluxus conceptual art project of the same name.

Leonard Norman Cohen was a Canadian singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist. Themes commonly explored throughout his work include faith and mortality, isolation and depression, betrayal and redemption, social and political conflict, and sexual and romantic love, desire, regret, and loss. He was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was invested as a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011, he received one of the Prince of Asturias Awards for literature and the ninth Glenn Gould Prize.