Colbie Caillat—The Fresh Face of a New Music Industry 
by Jack HayfordIn late January 2008 I happened to catch SoCal rising star Colbie Caillat on The David Letterman Show. I hadn't seen her perform before but an old friend from the Durango Songwriters Expo, Tim Fagan, is in her band. Tim is an incredibly talented singer/songwriter in his own right. And his voice and harmonies work beautifully with the "Bubbly" Caillat's. The Letterman performance was a bit dull, I thought. Colbie is young, early twenties, and her stage presence is a little weak...a little uncertain. "As her song 'One Fine Wire' relates, she has stage fright — which makes her more comfortable with 100,000 fans online than 1,000 in a concert hall. 'I'm nervous every time,' she says. 'I have to take myself out of that moment and remind myself just to sing and do the music. I really haven't conquered it yet.'" —USA Today But she will improve over time and her music is smart, wholesome and poppy enough to cross genres from Country to A/C. If you like Norah Jones, Lily Allen, Jewel...you'll like this gal. Colbie Caillat is one of the first artists to truly "break out" via the new Internet phenomena called "social networking sites." Her infectious song, "Bubbly," attracted hundreds of thousands of MySpace listeners and she spent four months in 2007 as the online community's most-played unsigned artist. She wasn't unsigned for long. Her new album, Coco (her nickname), was released by Universal, the industry's biggest (at this writing) Music Group. Colbie comes by her talent and success naturally. Her dad Ken is a music-biz veteran famous for engineering and co-producing two of Fleetwood Mac's biggest (and most highly regarded) albums, Rumours and Tusk. "Being in the studio with him when he was mastering an album, I would watch him, and he would teach me the console," she says. "He was the one who told me if I wanted to be a singer, I'd have to learn how to play an instrument and write my own songs, because that was the only way to have a lasting career and be respected...." —USA Today But unlike making it in the Fleetwood Mac era, this artist didn't need no stinkin' record label to find (buy) fans for her. They too just came naturally, organically. "The great thing about MySpace is that you can build up an army of fans and then when you go to a record company, there's no point in them trying to change what you do because it's already been tried and tested," she points out. In these days of hard times in the record selling business you can bet the A&R staff at most companies has been whittled down to a small group of Myspace/Facebook surfers. The choice of new music is seeminly endless and the quality in may cases, is, well, ready for market. Bigtime. Check out Colbie Caillat at her website. Bubbly Lyrics Will you count me in? I've been awake for a while now It starts in my toes The rain is falling on my window pane It starts in my toes What am I gonna say And it starts in my toes I've been asleep for a while now And it stats in my soul Wherever wherever wherever you go wherever you go
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