Foy Vance

Though he spent most of his formative years in the grim surroundings of 1980s Belfast, singer/songwriter Foy Vance's musical vision is the product of an entirely different sort of nervous tension -- the cross-racial friction, harmony, and disharmony that gave rise to jazz, blues, and soul in the American South, where Vance, the son of a traveling church minister, spent the pivotal first five years of his life. Drawn particularly to the spiritual aspect of those music forms, Vance took his cues from the likes of Otis Redding and Nina Simone, adjusting his own guttural singing s...