It appears as if Leona Lewis, Britain's diva-of-the-moment, has struck pop music gold.
Not only was the 22-year-old Londoner's debut album of pop-R&B-and-soul, Spirit, co-produced by the legendary music executive Clive Davis and American Idol's Simon Cowell, but she's already had high profile appearances on Oprah Winfrey and Jay Leno, with more TV gigs over the next week leading up to the album's April 8 release: (GMA, April 4), Regis & Kelly (April 8), Ellen and Jimmy Kimmel (April 11).
If Lewis, who already has the fastest-selling debut of all time in England (Spirit sold over one million copies in just five weeks and had the biggest selling single of last year, Bleeding Love) is feeling any pressure to perform similarly across the pond, she's not saying.
"I'm just taking every moment in, not taking anything for granted, and remembering everything and really enjoying it," said Lewis down the line from California after a promotional trip to Toronto got cancelled at the last minute.
"They really embraced (the album) back home and it was so lovely, it did so well, far beyond anything I could have expected, and then to come now to (North America) and to be able to release it here was just amazing because most of the album was recorded and written here, so I was happy that I was actually going to get to share it with the people here. I just find myself really, really lucky."
'A big achievement'
It probably helps that Bleeding Love has made her only the third British female to have a No. 1 song on Billboard's Top 100 after Sheena Easton and Petula Clark.
"I'm very excited and everyone's so happy," she said. "I guess it is a big achievement for someone coming from the part of the U.K. I'm from, the east part of London, and I'm from Hackney, so I think everyone's very proud there as well. It's not known as one of the good areas of London."
But apparently the grooming started early.
Lewis -- whose father is Guyanese and mother is Welsh -- was enrolled in the Sylvia Young Theatre School when she was just five. She wrote her first song at age 12 and also attended the performing arts academy, The BRIT School, but left early after winning several talent contests.
She supported herself in part-time jobs, including working as a Pizza Hut waitress, and had almost given up on having a music career before auditioning for England's The X-Factor (an Idol-like British talent show executive produced and judged by Cowell) in 2006 and won by a landslide.
In fact, the normally hard-to-please Cowell was so impressed with her that he called Davis personally, saying he thought he had the next Whitney Houston -- one of Lewis' favourite singers -- on his hands.
Davis then introduced Lewis to a long list of songwriters and producers for Spirit, including One Republic's frontman Ryan "Alias" Tedder, who co-wrote and produced Bleeding Love. Other collaboraters included Akon and Ne-Yo, although she also did a cover of the Roberta Flack hit, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
"(Cowell and Davis) opened the doors for me to have an opportunity to create a really amazing album," she said. "It's all very daunting when you're meeting people on this level, especially coming into it being an unknown, ordinary girl from London, and then going into this world where there are these amazing songwriters who have written some of my favourite songs. And Clive Davis, who has launched Alicia Keys, Santana and Whitney Houston, it's very, very daunting, but I'm just thinking, 'I've been given this chance and I've just got to go for it.' "
