source: Gin Wigmore's Facebook page

There are so, so many blonde, 20-something solo indie artists that it's hard to keep them all straight. Among these blonde 20-something indie artists, there are yet more subdivisions ... the Duffy types, the Ellie Goulding types, the acoustic folky singer-songwriter types ...

Gin Wigmore is an artist I'd heard of previously, but as with many artists I hear for the first time, she got lost in the "blonde, 20-something solo indie artist" mix. It wasn't until I heard a song of hers on Spotify recently that I paid her some real attention. To cut to the chase, she has a Duffy-esque quality about her, but her songs generally seem to tend towards the pop-rock side of things, rather than soul, blues, jazz. And Gin Wigmore is from Auckland, New Zealand, rather than the United Kingdom.

(Someday soon it will no longer matter where an artist is from, in terms of musical influence and style. Maybe it's already happened.)

The story behind Gin Wigmore is that she wrote a song dedicated to her father, a song that her sister submitted to the International Songwriting Competition. Subsequently, Gin (Virginia) won the competition, becoming the youngest and only unsigned Grand Prize winner in the competition's history. She would've been 17 or 18 years old at the time.

Here are some of my favorite songs by Gin Wigmore, so far: