Made Out of Stars – Anne Steele – Live at Zédel

Anne Steele performed Made Out of Stars at Live at Zédel, London.

Star rating: five stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This was a return visit on for New York singer-songwriter Anne Steele who released her new EP in January this year. She co-wrote the album in Los Angeles with rock star songwriters Shane Stevens and Nash Overstreet.

The album, which was produced via crowdfunding, demonstrates not only the vocal powers that Steele has as a singer but also demonstrates her skill at writing songs for the moment. She is obviously political in her outlook on society and what it will or will not accept, and she likes to include everybody within her ambit. She has no time for pigeonholing people into categories that are not useful when it comes to reaching out with whatever message she has to impart.

Not that Steele is at all polemical in communicating with her audience. She takes a liberal approach to everything. She is gay and out and proud with it and not only gracious about her sexual orientation but, one has the feeling, she is also glad to be an artist with an ability to connect with a wider audience through her songs.

From the new album her recent set included ‘Obsessed’, ‘I Miss Those Days’, ‘Love Somebody’ and ‘Better’, all of which are her own new songs which she performs with the requisite and at times raw emotions full out, seemingly determined to hold nothing back. Her encore ‘Love Can Take Us There’ proved to be a very moving performance.

Steele opened and closed her set with ‘Come Alive’ and ‘This Is Me’, two songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul from the film The Greatest Showman, which happens to be one of the best film scores in recent years. ‘This Is Me’ was nominated for an Academy Award but lost out to Lady Gaga’s ‘Shallow’ from A Star is Born.

In between her own material Steele gave us passionate versions of Labrinth’s ‘Beneath Your Beautiful’, Pink’s ‘Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken’, Alanis Morrisette’s ‘You Oughta Know’, Stevie Wonder’s ‘Love’s In Need of Love Today’ and Tears For Fears’ ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’, a beautiful song, radiantly sung and one that is still so apt and topical for today.

Her powerful renditions were supported by Steele’s brilliant back-up singers, Chelsey Chantelle and Jessica Lovelock, not to mention her excellent musicians, Craig Mather on drums and guitar, Johnny Wells on bass guitar and musical director William T. N. Hall on piano. Altogether, it was an uplifting evening with rather more raw emotion than is usually found at Crazy Coqs.

Michael Darvell