Dalton Harris

“We look for music that speaks to our souls”, is how Dalton Harris views his work — but the power with which his music really speaks to our souls is all down to the fact that he doesn’t see his work as work at all. “I’m always recording, I’m always writing, and that’s just naturally me,” he smiles. “It’s funny when people tell me to take a break: I feel like I’m already having one.” If anyone deserves a break from life’s relentlessness it’s this 25-year-old Jamaican singer songwriter, who should’ve spent 2019 celebrating his new life in the UK but was instead putting himself back together following the collapse of the only significant relationship he’d ever known. It’s captured in stark detail by Dalton’s elegant but brutal single Cry, a song that started life as a memo in his phone — an electronic treasure trove of prose, poems, and, perhaps most revealingly of all, unsent text messages. Dalton’s first UK single — duetting with James Arthur on Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s The Power Of Love — gave him his first smash hit, and his new label set about concocting big ideas for how Dalton’s career would progress. Dalton, the label were pleased to discover, had ideas of his own. “I realised I had to take control because I didn’t want to be someone else, and it worked. I go into studios with people who expect me to be ‘an X Factor guy’ but it’s only when I show them I’m different that it starts to work. If you bring a fully-grown tree to the forest, it won’t stand out.