Piece by Piece | ||||
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Studio album by Katie Melua | ||||
Released | 26 September 2005 | |||
Recorded | 2004-05 | |||
Genre | ||||
Length | 44:32 | |||
Label | Dramatico | |||
Producer | Mike Batt | |||
Katie Melua chronology | ||||
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Singles from Piece by Piece | ||||
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Professional ratings | |
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Review scores | |
Source | Rating |
AllMusic | |
Rolling Stone |
Piece by Piece is the second studio album by British-Georgian jazz and blues singer Katie Melua. It was released on 26 September 2005 by Dramatico Records. In the United Kingdom, the album debuted at #1 with 120,459 copies sold in its first week.
Its first single, "Nine Million Bicycles", became Melua's first top five hit in the UK and caused controversy when science writer Simon Singh said the lyrics "demonstrates a deep ignorance of cosmology and no understanding of the scientific method". After an amusing and good-natured debate in the Press Melua eventually recorded Singh's version, which both agreed was scientifically accurate and musically pathetic.
The second single was a double A-side comprising "I Cried for You" and a cover of The Cure's "Just Like Heaven". The former song was written after Melua met the writer of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and is about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, while the latter was recorded for the soundtrack to the film Just Like Heaven. The single peaked outside the UK top twenty, and the album's third single, "Spider's Web" (which Melua wrote when she was eighteen, during the Iraq war) did not reach the top forty.
Melua wrote the title song "Piece By Piece" after she broke up with her boyfriend Luke Pritchard, and "Half Way up the Hindu Kush" was written by Katie and Mike Batt as a joke playing on the innuendo implicit in the title phrase, which cropped up in a conversation about scarves on a train journey. Katie wrote the chorus and Mike the verses. Alongside covers of "Blues in the Night" and Canned Heat's "On the Road Again", the album includes "Thankyou, Stars", which was previously released as a B-side on Melua's debut single "The Closest Thing To Crazy" in 2003.