Madeleine Peyroux is the best selling jazz vocalist of the last decade. With her new album Bare Bones Madeleine has crafted her best album yet, for the first time all the songs on the album have been written or co-written by Madeleine herself. “This really is a new experience for me - it’s almost as if I got to make my first record again,” she says. “I’d co-written a couple of times in the past, but this was a big leap for me as a writer, not only in the experience of writing but also the message I wanted to portray”. Review If they ever make a biopic about Madeliene Peyroux there'll be no shortage of key moments to for them to illustrate; busking around Europe as a teenager; 2004's Careless Love selling over a million; record company-hired private detectives trying to track her down after she goes AWOL. It'll all make great Hollywood for sure. However, it's likely that the most important scene will be the making of this, her fourth album since 1996. Despite occasionally tossing a tune of her own into an appealing though often undemanding best-selling blend of jazz and blues, for the bulk of her career she's been praised as an interpreter rather than a writer of songs. Now collaborating with producer Larry Klein, Julian Coryell (son of jazz guitar legend Larry) and Steely Dan's Walter Becker amongst others, she's begun to delve deeper into her own experiences. Damn The Circumstances and Love And Treachery capture the moment when anyone who's ever been in love, wakes up at 3 a.m. to be haunted or taunted by what's got them to that particular point in their life. Klein's production tenderly embraces Peyroux's brooding muse, whilst pianist Jim Beard's understated eloquence is often the album's quiet star. There was a time when if someone said that Ms.Peyroux had a great voice, the smart reply was ''yes, but it's a pity it belongs to Billie Holiday''. With Bare Bones she's finally finding her own. The really interesting part of the Madeleine Peyroux story starts here. --Sid SmithFind more music at the BBC This link will take you off Amazon in a new window