Yes, she does look like Anastacia. She is blonde and wears glasses. That is where the comparison ends. Abruptly.

Critics pigeonhole her as the Norah Jones of light jazz or perhaps another Madeleine Peyroux.

Gardot’s voice is smooth and her songwriting simple and elegant. ‘My one and only thrill’ is her second album. She is only 25 years old, but has recorded with jazz greats such as Herbie Hancock.

She is also ‘disabled’.

She wears the glasses because she is sensitive to light. She wears earplugs because she is sensitive to sound. She walks with a cane.

Melody Gardot was knocked off her bicycle by a Jeep that skipped a red robot at the age of 19. She suffered spinal injuries and brain damage. She spent a year in hospital lying on her back.

She taught herself to play guitar, then to hum, then to sing and finally to speak again.

The music she creates today has an emotional maturity beyond her years, a kind of edge that someone who stared death in the eye might have, and one can speculate that she has it because of what she went through, but the point is, she has it and that separates her from the likes of Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux.