Reviewed by Ian Phillips.
By Natalie Nicole Gilbert, Harbor Road Entertainment 2021.
I had never heard of Natalie Nicole Gilbert until this album turned up and now I’ve received two albums from her.
She’s a Los Angeles based multi-awarded singer/songwriter/producer who comes from a musical family.
Her mother played piano with Liberace, she has a vocalist sister and a brother in a rock band, with her father being the only one in the nuclear family not to be a professional musician (he works for the aircraft company Lockheed Martin).
Gilbert has released 14 albums and 17 singles and she’s a voting member of the American Recording Academy.
In addition to this she’s spent more than ten years in radio and she’s composed music for both film and television shows including Law and Order and The Office.
Warm winter is an album of covers of some well-known and some lesser-known songs, much of it performed by Natalie accompanied only by herself on piano.
It’s a beautifully gentle album, the sort of album that you’d put on to listen to as you curl up in front of an open fire.
She includes songs from Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Foster, Joni Mitchell, and Fleetwood Mac amongst other well-known artists.
I very much enjoyed her rendition of Don McLean’s Vincent, its simplicity really highlighted the pathos of the song.
One of the most interesting tracks has her singing the lyrics of Gosh Groban’s What Child is This over the melody of We Three Kings in a track titled What Child of Kings. It works very well.
She does a delightful jazz version of Steve Rice’s Wrapped Up in a Dream Called You accompanied by Steve Rice himself on piano with a classy jazz quartet backing.
The Joni Mitchell song covered is her 1971 Christmas folk song River and the Fleetwood Mac song is Landslide.
The strength of this album lies in its simplicity, it’s delightfully gentle and understated.
