James Morrison et Emeli Sandé

When it comes to songwriting , getting started early is a must if you want to be taken seriously by your early twenties. However, most first attempts at songwriting while still in one’s preteens are usually composed in one’s bedroom, before being consigned to the front of a long-forgotten notebook, never to be looked at again. This was not the case for an eleven year old Adele Emily Sandé, who wrote her very first song expressly to be performed at a school talent show. This either shows some serious confidence or serious stupidity and thankfully enough, it turned out to show some serious, and well placed, confidence.

That very performance made her think that she might want to be a songwriter as a career, and fast forward five years she was on the verge of signing a record contract with Telstar records. However, those five years had moulded Sandé into a very smart young woman, and she turned it down in favour of going to university. I’m going to go out on a limb here, and guess that this was something which her father, a teacher at her secondary school, was pretty psyched about. Soon after that she studied a five year medicine course at the University of Glasgow, graduating with a degree in neuroscience.

By the time she graduated, Adrian Sykes, the same manager that she’d had at sixteen, had waited for her and together they began working on her career proper. Sandé very nearly made it all over again with her very first act after graduating, as her sister made a video of Sandé covering “Nasty Little Lady” on the piano and they sent it to Trevor Nelson’s BBC Urban Music Competition. Of course, Sandé won the show and was offered a record contract soon afterwards, but the deal unfortunately fell through.

Not to be deterred, Sandé and her whole family got to work promoting her music to anyone who would listen, and some of her first radio play on Ras Kwame’s BBC radio show got her a concert right in the heart of Soho. It was at this concert where she met a writer and producer named Shahid Khan, otherwise known as Naughty Boy. The two of them hit it off and began writing songs for other artists together, with tracks going to everyone from Tinie Tempah to Cheryl Cole and Professor Green. After these tracks proved popular, Sandé herself signed a solo contract with Virgin Records, and by 2011 was signed to EMI as well.

Truth be told, Emeli Sandé was a dead cert from the start, and when her first single “Heaven” was released in August 2011, it went straight to number two on the U.K singles chart in its first week of release. Her debut album “Our Version Of Events” went to number one when it was released in February 2012, and later became the biggest selling album of that year in the U.K, with over a million copies sold. Since then, Earth has become Sandé’s world, we just live in it. She performed at both the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics, sang for President Barack Obama at The White House and four of her six singles peaked in the top five of the UK charts.

With her masterful songwriting skills and even better performances, we’re going to be seeing a lot of her in the near future, and we should all be very grateful for that. Highly recommended.