Draft:Melanie Gabriel

Melanie Gabriel (born 23 August, 1976) is an English Singer-songwriter.

Career
She is a daughter of the musician, composer and songwriter Peter Gabriel and his first wife Jill Georgina Gabriel (daughter of Philip Moore) and grew up in the English city of Bath. After graduating from school, she went to New York together with her older sister Anna-Marie (born 1974). Here she attended college and studied painting and photography. After her education she returned to the country of her birth.

Melanie Gabriel gained international fame through her collaboration with her father, whom she accompanied on the Growing Up Tour between 2002 and 2004, documented on the live album Growing Up Live and the concert film of the same name. Anna-Marie Gabriel documented these performances in her 40-minute film Growing Up On Tour - A Family Portrait, in which she described the concerts from her sister's perspective. She also continued to sing on the Warm-Up Tour in 2007. Among other things, she interpreted songs that Peter Gabriel had originally recorded himself as a singer, for example Mother of Violence.

Melanie Gabriel had already begun an independent musical career in 1999, when she participated as a composer and singer in the compilation Refuge, the proceeds of which benefited refugees from Kosovo. Her first own album was released as a CD in 2002, combining introspective lyricism with predominantly minimalist musical structures in the song lyrics, which critics said hardly reminded them of her father.

Subsequently, she entered into various musical collaborations. In 2003, she produced albums with French musicians La Jarry and Hector Zazou and also performed with them. Zazou's album Strong Currents (2003), which brought together a number of well-known soloists, features her alongside Laurie Anderson, Irene Grandi and Jane Birkin, among others. Jane Birkin and Melanie Gabriel covered songs by Nina Hynes on this album.

After that, Melanie Gabriel opened her spectrum in the direction of world music. In 2004, she recorded the critically acclaimed album Words with Ugandan musician Geoffrey Oryema. In 2006, together with the Belgian producer and composer Thierry Van Roy, she began the music project Taïga Maya, which interweaves musical influences of the Siberian Yakut people with traditions from the Balkans and Latin America. The musicians presented this unusual experiment in a series of concerts, such as at the WOMAD Canarias festival in Las Palmas.

In 2023, she was heard again on backing vocals on the songs The Court, Four Kinds of Horses,, So Much and Live and Let Live from the Peter Gabriel album i/o.

Discography

 * 1999: Refuge (compilation), on the song Broken L with Peter Gabriel and Joy Askew
 * 2002: Melanie Gabriel (own studio album with 7 tracks)
 * 2002: Up (studio album by Peter Gabriel)
 * 2003: Growing Up Live (live DVD by Peter Gabriel)
 * 2003: Strong Currents (studio album by Hector Zazou), on the song Mmmh
 * 2004: Words (studio album by Geoffrey Oryema)
 * 2010: Taiga Maya (DVD + book with CD), Projekt in Zusammenarbeit mit dem belgischen Künstler Thierry Van Roy
 * 2011: New Blood (studio album by Peter Gabriel), on the song Downside Up, newly orchestrated version of the track on the studio album OVO, composed for the Millennium Dome Show to the year 2000 in the Millennium Dome at the Greenwich Peninsula in London
 * 2011: New Blood: Live in London (DVD by Peter Gabriel)
 * 2012: Live Blood (Live album by Peter Gabriel)
 * 2019: Growing Up Live (Livea album by Peter Gabriel)
 * 2023: i/o (Studio album by Peter Gabriel), Accompanying vocals for various titles