London, UK · pop

Natasha Bedingfield

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Mid-2000s British pop whose biggest single has had roughly three separate cultural afterlives — 'Unwritten' refuses, gloriously, to die.

Natasha Bedingfield was born in London to New Zealand parents and grew up in both London and Auckland. As a teenager she sang with her siblings, including her brother Daniel Bedingfield, in a dance-pop project called the DNA Algorithm, and later spent a year studying psychology at the University of Greenwich before leaving to focus on songwriting full time.

She wrote and recorded songs for Hillsong Church UK in the early 2000s, work that predated her signing to Phonogenic Records, an imprint of BMG UK, in 2003. She emerged as a solo artist around the same time as her brother Daniel, and her debut album, Unwritten, followed in 2004.

Unwritten sold more than 2.3 million copies worldwide and produced the songs she remains best known for: "These Words," her only UK number one, and the title track, whose open-ended, self-affirming lyric has kept it in circulation for two decades, in advertising, television and, more recently, online. The album earned her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance and two Brit Award nominations for Best British Female Artist.

Her material sits in a bright, hook-driven pop lane with touches of contemporary R&B. Her second album, N.B. (2007), produced the UK top-ten singles "I Wanna Have Your Babies" and "Soulmate." Reworked for North America as Pocketful of Sunshine, it added a lighter electronic finish and the single "Pocketful of Sunshine," which reached number five on the Billboard Hot 100 and became her best-selling single in the US.

She writes or co-writes much of her work and performs it with a straightforward, unfussy delivery. A third album, Strip Me, followed in North America in 2010. Across her career she has sold more than 10 million albums and 10 million singles worldwide, and in 2012 VH1 placed her at number 66 on its list of the 100 Greatest Women in Music.

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