Sheila Nicholls

Sheila Nicholls is a songwriter and recording artist based in Los Angeles. She went there at 19 to stay with a friend and never went home. Her songs sit between desire and yearning on one side and social commentary on the other. They include feminist fantasies, testimonies to the failure of war, and anthems about the freedom of rewriting our collective mythology and our own.

She has released three albums: Brief Strop (1999), Wake (2002) and Songs From the Bardo (2009). Her first was distributed by Hollywood Records and reached the US college Top Ten Billboard chart in 2000. Its track "Fallen for You" appears in the film High Fidelity and on its soundtrack. Wake was made with a team that included Glen Ballard, Jez Colin, Mike Elezondo and Ozomatli. She toured widely, opened for k.d. lang, and played "Faith", which reached the Billboard top 40, on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Songs From the Bardo came a few years after the birth of her daughter. It was largely written, played, engineered and produced by Sheila at home.

Her newest record, All of Nature, is a collection of social commentary set to music. It connects what is personal to what is not limited by time, on the premise that consciousness is itself a bigger crucible than matter. It is self-produced and includes co-writes with Michael Bernard Beckwith and Dave Stringer. Each lyric is accompanied by an additional commentary and forum on her website. For the recording she brought together a band of players whose credits include work with John Legend, Meshell Ndegeocello, Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette, James Taylor and Wayne Shorter, with Pete Min engineering.

The Guardian has said she sounds like a cross between Liz Phair and Kate Bush, and LA Weekly called her wit "battery acid" and her voice "just plain seductive".