Lily Allen

Lily Allen's album, Alright Still, was finally released in the US this week. (It was released last summer in England, and quickly went to the top of the charts.) As many people know, Lily Allen was one of the first MySpace success stories. She dropped a couple of demos on her site and very quickly started collecting friends and hits at a rate that freaked out the mainstream record business, leading to major label envy and then major label success. (Whether she can duplicate that success in the US remains to be scene. So far, her fan base here seems to consist mainly of a few lonely bloggers and and some hipster girls.)
Whatever. Lily Allen has everything going for her: she is smart, pretty, genuinely funny (in an English Sarah Silverman way) and she writes very witty pop songs. Whether she makes it in America is beside the point.
Since everything on her album has been posted and reposted several times over, I'm attaching a mixtape she posted on her own website last year. It contains bits and pieces of her own songs, as well as a lot of her obvious influences.
Lily Allen - Mixtape #2
(Warning: This file is almost 60 mg. That's pretty big.)
It's been interesting to observe the Lily Allen phenomenon at my office. I work at a company that edits television commercials. Last summer I started pushing Lily Allen songs on the editors, trying to get them to use her music as needle drop. Initially, I met a lot of resistance. Most people weren't familiar with her and didn't listen that closely; the people who had heard of her thought she was an English Britney. As time went on, an awareness of her began to seep through. All of a sudden editors are using her music in rough cuts. You can hear her music being played behind closed Avid suite doors. If you took a poll of the editors and their assistants (who are younger and maybe more aware of whatr's going on in the world of music), she has gone from a "Who's that?" to "She's awesome."