here are times when radio (satellite, Internet, or otherwise) is the perfect way to hear a new musical artist. Faced with simple tonality, without the blazing flurry of video images, imagination is free to conjure whatever personality it likes behind the microphone.

The first time this reviewer heard "Warwick Ave.," by Duffy in late 2008, with its soulful sadness, world-weary heartbreak yet unbridled hope, it seemed easy to peg the voice as belonging to a weathered Detroit rhythm & blues singer. A listen to "Mercy," another single released at roughly the same time, revealed a hint of driving Chicago soul, and its singer's bona fides as a possible, modern-day Diana-Ross-meets-Roberta-Flack.

Now, even seasoned listeners get sandbagged occasionally, but the disparity between the imagined Duffy and the real-life, towheaded, pixieish imp that she really is, is astonishing. First, she may be weathered but she ain't old. Born in 1984 in Wales and raised to speak Welsh as her mother tongue, Aimeé Duffy grew up without a record collection of her own but found her infatuation with music inspired while watching-of all things-Whoopi Goldberg's performance in the movie Sister Act. And, though she looks like a Hollywood deb who would be more at home in a mansion on Canyon Road than in a dismal, windswept corner of the United Kingdom, she was no stranger to difficulty. In 1998 she was briefly put it in a safe house when police uncovered a plot by her stepfathers ex-wife to pay a hitman to kill her stepfather.

She likely drew on these difficult experiences in writing and performing the album Rockferry, released in March of 2008 and which entered the United Kingdom album chart at number one.  Beat driven, passionate, and astonishingly thoughtful, Rockferry remained, however, a somewhat undiscovered gem in the U.S..

Duffy will release a new (as yet untitled) album in 2009, and we expect it to be one of the most noteworthy of the year. In the meantime, listen for her cover of Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die" for the nonprofit organization War Child's compilation album, War Child Presents... Heroes.