Pop/R&B singer Stacie Orrico will release her third album, Beautiful Awakening, on January 16th on Virgin Records. The soulful, R&B-powered set comes after Orrico’s three-year absence from the music world, following an intense schedule of international touring and promotion behind her 2003 self-titled gold album, which spawned two Top Ten singles and was nominated for a Grammy Award. Physically and emotionally drained when the tour concluded, the 18-year-old, who by this point had sold a total of 3.4 million albums, returned home to Seattle to spend time with her family and reflect on whether she wanted to continue to make records. The break, during which time Orrico waited tables with her best friend at a seafood restaurant, enabled her to rediscover her love for music and begin to write songs again. The result is Beautiful Awakening, a sophisticated collection that reflects an artist coming into her own with stories of heartbreak and love. The music sets stripped-down raw beats, guitar, and piano against Orrico’s jazz-inflected powerhouse vocals. Orrico co-wrote a majority of the album and worked with a variety of top-notch producers, including Dallas Austin, Dwayne Bastiany, Kay Gee, and co-writers such as Shekspear, Track & Field, Anthony Dent, and newcomer Novel, a rapper, singer, producer, and songwriter who is the grandson of soul legend Solomon Burke and has written songs for Kelis and India Arie. The album’s lead-off single, the guitar-driven “I’m Not Missing You,” was made available for digital download in June and hit Top 40 radio on October 3rd. So far, the single, which was produced by ex-Naughty By Nature DJ Kay Gee, has been streamed more than 600,000 times on Orrico’s MySpace profile page. She has been invited to perform at several major annual radio shows across the country in December. Beautiful Awakening was released everywhere but the U.S. in August and hit Number One on the International Artists chart in Japan, where it has already gone gold and is on its way to platinum. The album is also Top 10 in radio airplay in Germany and Australia. – Listen to Dream You
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