James Blunt @ Forest

Take "No Bravery", the song that closes his debut album, "Back to Bedlam", for instance: It was written in Kosovo in 1999, while James was a reconnaissance officer in the British army. On patrol around Pristina, he kept his guitar bolted to the outside of his tank. But in quieter moments, it came out, as he wrote about life as a 22-year-old peacekeeper in the aftermath of one of the decade's bloodiest civil wars. The rest of his unit ordered him to keep the noise down as he wrote and sang in the post-midnight stillness. He didn't keep the noise down. "'No Bravery' is the only complete song I wrote in Kosovo. I wrote it lying by my tank in my sleeping bag with my boots on. You had to sleep with your boots on. The song is pretty fatalistic. The rest of the album is fatalistic," he says wryly. He went to California in September, 2003, to record his album, and discovered that being a slightly scruffy English boy in Los Angeles could be very pleasant. Staying at the home of an actress, he spent his days recording with Rothrock, and his nights...well...researching LA's club scene. "With my naïve background, it was like stepping into a devil's cauldron," he says, in happy reminiscence. He recorded the painfully poignant track "Goodbye, My Lover" in the actresses’ bathroom, where she kept an old piano.