Ed Harcourt

Bio:Since being Mercury Prize-nominated for 2001's Here Be Monsters, then winning innumerable accolades with 2003's From Every Sphere, Ed Harcourt has been falling in love, striding through Swedish snow in search of wild boars, recording with crack-addled cultish American rockers, touring U.S. arenas with R.E.M. and Wilco, rapping in karaoke bars, getting beaten up and almost run over by Mexican skinheads for accidentally throwing gravel at their car in Colorado, performing at tributes to Gram Parsons, Jeff Buckley, Randy Newman, Neil Young, and the Beatles, and deciding that every moment of every song should be the most important thing you've ever done.

In the past, Ed Harcourt, has been described as a highly talkative bundle of contradictions, crushingly self-deprecating one minute, verging on arrogance the next. And he still is. Ed's generous, racing, scurrying mind and Schumacher-driven mouth will give you pathos and morbid obsessions in one breath, cheery and earthy humor the next. He still loves Salinger, Tom Waits, Chet Baker, Shakespeare, and the Kinks. He adores movies from Lynch and Jarmusch to Milos Forman and Coppola. But as he says now, "You can live with these worlds, explore them, but although you have your inspirations, you always write differently to everyone else."