Album Notes

Winner of the 1999 SLAMMY (Salt Lake Area Music Award) for Best Folk/Acoustic and the 2001 SLAMMY for Best Female Vocalist. Melissa and her band also won the Salt Lake City Weekly's Showdown to Portland and performed at the '99 NXNW Music Festival. She was selected as the Best Local Singer in the 2000 citysearch reader's poll. During the summer of 2002 Melissa had the pleasure of performing for 3,000 people while opening for John Hiatt at Red Butte Gardens in Salt Lake City.

Reviews:
"Finally. This is the album that the fans of Melissa Warner have waited for.

Warner, a veteran of the Salt Lake City club and coffee house scene, gathered together a quality band to support out her wonderfully strong, knowing voice and insightful lyrics.

The group, which includes fiddler/steel guitarist Dan Salini, versatile drummer Adam Sorensen, bassist Doug Wright and guitarist David Prill, created a sound that fits nicely in the pop/folk/alternative country niche.

While there is not a clinker among the 11 original songs, "Emperor Norton" really hits its stride with the album's third tune, the mournful "New Streets."

Warner carries the audience with her along an introspective ride that brims with honesty."
(review by Martin Renzhofer, Salt Lake Tribune)

When he chose Emperor Norton to be among the Top Thirty Local CDs of 1999, Bill Frost of The Salt Lake City Weekly had this to say:

"With the aid of a crack band of backing musicians, Melissa Warner dressed up her deceptively pretty yet brutally honest folk tunes in No Depressionesque, alt-country threads and set 'em loose on Emperor Norton. The result is one of the coolest hybrids you'll hear in Happy Valley, but it would all be for naught if the songs weren't there. They are, delivered with Warner's unmistakable lilt that's strong enough for a man, but made for a woman."

Portland's alternative weekly, The Willamette Week, described her music this way: "Country that's more black stocking than barefoot, Rock and Roll that's more whisper than scream. Enter the world of Melissa Warner where Joni Mitchell's down the street and Emmylou's across the way."