I Dreamed A Dream by Susan Boyle (CD, 2009, Sony Music)

Product Description 2009 debut from the vocalist who became an overnight sensation after appearing on the first round of 2009's popular UK reality show Britain's Got Talent. Boyle caught the judges (and the world) off guard with her masterful rendition of 'I Dreamed A Dream' from the musical Les Misrables. Within hours of her appearance on the show, Boyle was not only an internet sensation; she was a world-wide phenomenon. This is the musical story of the year! About the Artist January 21st 2009 is not a date that Susan Boyle is ever likely to forget. I will never forget it, she clarifies, in her unmistakeably Celtic brogue. It was the day that the shy, devout 48 year old stepped onto the stage of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre in Glasgow for an audition on Britains Got Talent. Or to put it another way, the day her world turned 360 degrees on its head. In front of the three-strong panel of judges charged with divining which of this years British hopefuls really did have talent, the singing voice of Susan Boyle turned out to be a watershed moment neither she nor anyone involved in the show could possibly have foreseen. It is now both her and the shows defining moment.In her own haphazard fashion, during three and a half minutes of television airtime, later aired to slack-jawed intakes of breath in May of this year, Susan Boyle fashioned a new kind of fame. She elicited a moment of pure, molten zeitgeist. She broke every rule of the talent show book and tore up a considerable number of the pages of popular music marketing into the bargain. She symbolized an astonishing variety of the little-peoples revenge, quite by accident. Ms Boyle describes her own astonishing 2009 in refreshingly frank and simple terms. All I did was to apply for a talent show. I was lucky enough to be chosen. Thats it in a nutshell. But something deeper was going on in the collective public consciousness. If the two watchwords of the 21st century have been reality and celebrity, Susan Boyle had accidentally located a point on the graph where they both intersected. One of Britains forgotten characters had rarely, if ever, been so memorable.After her one audition for Britains Got Talent, in which she confounded the judges, the audience and then anyone with access to Youtubes expectations by dazzling her way through a version of the song I Dreamed A Dream, from the musical Les Miserables, a tornado of opinionated column inches, speculation, rumination and conjecture around Susan Boyle grew feverishly. 300 Million You Tube hits and counting. She became the subject of op-ed newspaper columns, a front cover sensation in her own right. This unlikely candidate for the melting pot of the new star machine in 21st century Britain caused computer crashes, miles of newsprint and the sophisticated approval of Hollywoods well-heeled and super-groomed A-list. Though the content differed wildly, everyone proffering their thoughts on the self-confessed wee wifey seemed agreed on one point. That in 2009, to be free of an opinion on Susan Boyle was to be free of opinion itself.For one brief moment, vanity itself collapsed. As that ancient old maxim Never judge a book by its cover clanked around the globe with speedy viral intensity, it was as if the world was about to offer its first unspoken apology for prizing beauty above all else. Perhaps it would temporarily forget its grotesquely accentuated new heights of judgement. Or perhaps Susan Boyle was just a fleeting icon by which a microscope was shone on our more fickle presumptions. Whatever history gifts the Susan Boyle story in the long term, it is now her time to prove that there is more to this incredible woman than being the symbol for a moment of international reflection. She will do it in the exact same way she entered our consciousness in the first place. With the raw combination of strength and fragility, beauty and solitude that is her singing voice.