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Singer/songwriter Keren Ann Zeidel, who records bilingual neo-folk music under the name Keren Ann, was born in Israel in 1974 to a Dutch-Javanese mother and a Russian-Israeli father. She was nine when her parents bought her a guitar, on which she learned to play songs by Joni Mitchell and Serge Gainsbourg. In the years to come, she would also learn to play the harmonica and the clarinet. Zeidel and her family, including a brother and sister, lived in Israel and Holland before settling in Paris, France, when she was 11. In the 1990s, Zeidel met musician/arranger Benjamin Biolay, with whom she would form a fruitful partnership. Later that decade, she had a small part (as Judith) in Alexandre Arcady's K, and in 1998 she released a handful of singles (including "I+I+I") as a member of Shelby. The singles attracted little attention, but Zeidel bounced back by releasing her full-length solo debut, La Biographie de Luka Philipsen, in 2000. On it, she combined trip-hop, folk, and French pop ...