Keep Me in Your Heart for a While: The Best of Madeleine Peyroux is the very first compilation release in the singer/songwriter’s 18-year career, including favorites not only from her Rounder catalog, but also tracks from her Atlantic and Decca/Emarcy catalogs. Additionally, the album includes one previously unreleased song—title track and Warren Zevon cover, “Keep Me in Your Heart”—which appeared in 2011’s independent film Union Square. Liner notes by former Atlantic Records A&R man, Yves Beauvais, complete the package.
Peyroux, whose voice is often compared to that of Billie Holiday’s, was discovered while in her early twenties, when Beauvais spotted her at a New York club. He recalls the precocious singer’s set to be “some of the most exciting, viscerally moving minutes of my music-listening life.” Beauvais signed Peyroux to Atlantic and co-produced her 1996 debut Dreamland. Peyroux’s husky voice enchanted audiences and critics alike, but it was 2004’s Careless Love —a wide-ranging collection of covers from Elliott Smith to Leonard Cohen-penned tracks—that proved to be a milestone release for the artist, fetching mainstream recognition and marking the start of a four-album-long collaboration with producer Larry Klein (Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Herbie Hancock).
The American-born Peyroux, whose career began as a teen busker on the streets of Paris, is a regularly touring, active artist, who has often returned to her love of busking between albums.