Kelsey Lu – Blood
I found out about Kelsey Lu because she called my management one day and said that she wanted to have a yakathon live from England with two other artists and I didn't know anything about her. Of course, I'd love to talk so I quickly checked her out and [laughs] another absolutely amazing genius.

What you probably don’t know about her, unless you looked her up and read everything, is that she's a classical cello player. She considers it her first instrument and she writes music for small orchestral ensembles. I saw a video of her where she was doing a book launch and she came out on stage, completely without ego, looking absolutely gorgeous, but with just a single cello. As it starts playing people are yakking their heads off. She played for about an hour and 15 minutes, well by the time she was 35 minutes in, you could hear a pin drop.

It was stunning. And right now, what is she doing? She's writing an opera. It's going to be amazing. I have no doubt about that. But anyway, that's how I got to find out about Kelsey and everything I researched [about her] was more and more amazing. In terms of her absolute honesty, about absolutely everything to the point where people are, you know, it's almost too much to take it's so honest. I know all her struggles and what she experienced in her life up to now, how difficult that was, and I'm not saying anything that she doesn't say … she comes from such a compassionate place.

I was stunned by her openness, her frankness, and also, I felt the musicality of it was so adventurous. Anyway, she ended up being asked to do a version of one of my pieces that will be put out on a record that is coming out soon, where it's all of these different artists that have done covers of some of my pieces. My wife and I sat and we listened to it with our mouths open. She's really sensitive and really capable.