"…not just timbre and tone, but the actual phonetic stuff of speech. Most singers, when they sing, lose their accent. Melody tends to flatten vowels into whatever shape the tune demands. Harding has spent years moving in the opposite direction, shaping her melodies around accent, letting the cadences and intonations of spoken language determine the form the music takes.

It’s not a stylistic quirk. It is a compositional principle, and it has unlocked something elemental in her song craft."