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"Fantastically talented" - Jay-Z

"Incredible voice" - Antonio "LA" Reid

The seven songs on Laura Warshauer’s eponymous debut initially appear to be steeped in a sense of longing and regret, an attempt to hold onto happy memories and let go of painful ones. But on repeated listens, the songs divulge themselves and ultimately, offer a hopeful spirit at their core.

A New Jersey native, Laura Warshauer is the product of a tight-knit family who has been writing songs since she was 14. Warshauer first picked up the guitar two years earlier at age 12, mastering both Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” and Joan Osbourne’s “One of Us,” then began writing her own songs with titles like “Take Me Home,” “Free Spirit” (“about a beach bum) and “Sign in Disguise” (“I thought it was incredibly deep at the time”).

When she was 14, $50 in hand, Laura reserved an hour at a studio on the Jersey shore she found in the Yellow Pages. Walking up two flights of stairs into the main recording room, she still remembers the smell of cigarette smoke in the air and her dad picking her up at the end of the day, a bag of pretzels and Gatorade in hand.

“Songwriting gave me my own language to talk about anything I wanted,” she recalls, “a way to communicate complex emotions with simple clarity and purpose. I can dramatize situations, but I try to get at the essence of an emotion, while setting them in a place that’s real, finding a different way to say something that’s been said a thousand times before.”

Graduating early from high school, Laura spent a year at St. Andrews University in Scotland before attending NYU, during which she began hanging out at the now-defunct Sony Music Studios on West 54th with Rich Keller (DMX, Lyfe Jennings), who took the young singer-songwriter under his wing after hearing her play and ended up producing her debut EP.

“I was hooked right away,” she says the studio scene, where she padded around in her socks and raided their chocolate drawer. “It was like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory for music. I knew I’d found my place.”

Through a colleague of Keller, a demo tape reached the hands of Island Def Jam Chairman Antonio “L.A.” Reid, who dropped in on a Sunday night rehearsal of Warshauer and her band, practically signing her on the spot.

After an early acoustic indie release, Warshauer’s major label bow maintains its focus on a voice that evokes such master story-tellers and lyricists as Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos and Stevie Nicks. “I felt a real sense of freedom making this record,” she says. “We approached it musically with the attitude that the possibilities were limitless, we’d do whatever best served the melodies, lyrics and vibe of each song.”

Now that her debut is finished, Laura has set her sights on the future. Constantly communicating with her fans on-line via written and video blogs, she says, “I would like to inspire women who are my age, who can relate to what I’m talking about.”

To that end, since the age of 16, Warshauer has participated in the organization Musicians on Call, which brings live music to the bedside of hospital patients since its start on the pediatric cancer ward at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. “What’s so nice is I got in on the ground level, when it was just a handful of people involved in New York, Philadelphia and Nashville,” she says. “It’s just a wonderful thing to be involved with.”

This fall, Laura performed with the Gin Blossoms and the Nappy Roots. She was a featured performer at the SXSW BMI brunch, Lollapalooza Music Lounge and CMJ.