4 To Watch: Kate Nash

Hometown: London
Fun fact: Nash not only honed her acting chops at a U.K. performing-arts college, she scripted her own short film and a full-length play, too.
Why she's worth watching: Her brilliant folk-pop debut, Made Of Bricks, is filled with quirky observations sung in a whimsical English lilt; Already topping the overseas charts, it lands Stateside on Geffen in January.
For fans of: Lily Allen, Regina Spektor, Camera Obscura

Naturally, with all her stage experience, Kate Nash assumed she’d be a shoo-in at Bristol’s posh Old Vic Theatre School. She thought wrong. And the moment she received her rejection letter, she recalls, “was the fickle, fateful day. I hate how you’ll concentrate all your energy on something like that, and then in one line you know the worst.” Devastated, she went to the cinema to cheer herself up. “And I ended up watching Brokeback Mountain, all by myself. Happy, happy times.” In the evening, Nash got dressed up to see a play, headed out of her room, and thud—tripped down a flight of stairs, breaking her foot in the process. “I just sat there at the bottom and bawled my eyes out,” the 20-year-old admits. “And it wasn’t even the pain in my foot—it was just a way for me to finally cry, because I hadn’t cried yet over being so upset.”

And therein hangs the ironic tale. Confined to her bedroom in a full leg cast, Nash was given an amp and an electric guitar by her sympathetic parents, and she began to write songs in earnest. She’d played piano as a kid, and toyed with an acoustic six-string. But the wry conversational vignettes she began setting to music—like the eloquent-boy-meets-goofy-girl “Birds,” and her soured-romance breakthrough hit “Foundations”—quickly caught on in self-booked club gigs and in the star-making arena of MySpace (a la her chief supporter Lily Allen).

After Nash’s first successful concert, she was quite pleased to phone her boss “at this rubbish job I was working and say ‘I’m very sorry, but opportunities have arisen that are steps in the right direction toward my career.’ And I never went back—one show had given me the idea that this would be my life.”