Odette may be a relative newcomer on the music scene, but the 21-year-old's arrival has been a long time in the making.
Her full name is Georgia Odette Sallybanks, and she was just 17 when she began working on the bones of what would eventually become ‘To A Stranger’, a bold and confident debut record brimming with deliberate melodies, clever compositions and lyrical meditations on love and life plucked straight from the heart.
The first taste of what she’d been building came in winter of 2017, with 'Watch Me Read You'. The song’s carefully constructed blend of spoken-word and soaring melodies is emblematic of Odette’s passions and influences more broadly. The track samples audio from an interview with Maya Angelou, a poet Odette counts alongside Walt Whitman and Sylvia Plath as her favourites. “I’ve always been really into writing poetry and that’s kind of reflected in my music.”
Guidance for her debut record "To A Stranger" came in the form of producer Damian Taylor, who’s worked in the past with bands like , , and . When they met, Odette had a trove of material to pull from, and Damian set to work both narrowing the focus and expanding what her songs could be.
“It’s just me and a keyboard when I’m at home writing a song,” she says. “He added all these new elements so I could actually enact my fantasies of putting strings in my music. We ended up broadening the world of it.”
