Beth Hart

November 22, 1999
Web posted at: 6:36 p.m. EST (2336 GMT)

From Serena Yang
CNN WorldBeat Correspondent

LOS ANGELES (CNN) -- Beth Hart, considered by many fans to be a latter-day Janis Joplin, is scoring international success with her latest album, "Screamin' for My Supper." The 27-year-old Los Angeles native says her singing and songwriting are all about being honest, something she attributes to musical legends who came before her.

Hart began her musical career at age 4 when she took up the piano. She says her tastes evolved from Ludwig van Beethoven and J.S. Bach to Aretha Franklin and Etta James.

"I loved the blues and that sweaty, stinky thing so much because it seemed so totally honest," Hart says. "And it's the roots of America. It's the roots of 'old school,' you know?"

That I'm-going-to-do-it-anyway attitude is a hallmark of Hart's singing, a style that draws those comparisons to 1960s rocker Joplin. As a teen-ager, Hart says, she heard the comparison so often, she decided to learn more about Joplin. "I think I was around 19, and I rented a videotape on her and watched it and just loved it. I thought that she was really honest and vulnerable."

Hart says it was seven years before she landed a deal. "I'd been trying to do this since I was 15, sending out the demo tapes and doing all the things that everyone told me that I should be doing. But no deal -- like never," she says. "And I was getting bummed. I was 22 and I was thinking, 'You know, forget it. I'm just tired of trying to get a deal.'

"Within two months of giving all that up, I met David Wolf, my manager, and he had us auditioning for Atlantic (Records) within a few weeks."

In 1996, she released her first album, "Immortal," and supported it with a nine-month international tour. Hart would soon learn she was nowhere near finished paying her dues.

	CLIPS FROM "SCREAMIN'   FOR MY SUPPER"
"L.A. Song" [125k MPEG-3] or [170k WAV] "Delicious Surprise" [75k MPEG-3] or [105k WAV] (Courtesy Atlantic Records)

"When you hear someone say to you, 'Yeah, you got a record deal,' you think that's it, a dream has come true," Hart says. "'We're going to make music, we're going to tour, we're going to have a great time, life's going to be a peach' -- and no, no, no, no, no.

"So we got on the road and just slowly but surely, we just crumbled apart and ate each other alive." The Beth Hart Band broke up when the tour finished, and she retreated to Birmingham, Alabama, where she'd made some friends during the tour.

After five months there, Hart decided to return to Los Angeles and began working on "Screamin' for My Supper." One of the biggest hits from the album is "L.A. Song," a semi-autobiographical story of how a relationship-gone-bad gave Hart the courage to put her life onto the right track.

"This time around," Hart says, "it was just like, 'Let's talk about the truth here -- how are we really feeling?' And not worry so much what people think. It just takes like a little faith, you know?"