EMILIE SIMON first made her mark on the U.S. in the fall of 2006 with her debut U.S. release, The Flower Book on Nov. 7, 2006. Her plush, artful soundscapes had already yielded her significant praise and awards in her French homeland, as well as acclaim across the rest of Europe and Japan. Emilie allows her music to flow naturally, rewarding her with devoted fans worldwide. It’s in New York, birthplace of all artistic hybrids, that Emilie Simon now lives, meaning that it’s in the heart of the Big Apple that the seeds of The Big Machine were planted and grown. The Big Machine: an impressive third album from a young French woman with a new freedom of expression, singing (almost exclusively) in English and continuing an expanded version of the musical adventure she started in 2003. She recorded her feelings day by day, approaching songs not as something magical, detached from the real world, but as a veritable sketchbook for the sensorial overload that is life in New York.

This New York singer–songwriter knows about heavy: the lonesome, quiet kind, where the sinner's wages of Marianne Faithfull's saloon songs meet the spectral defiance of Lucinda Williams' country blues. Produced by Joseph Arthur with the haunted touch of Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind, Come Down was one of 2005's pleasures: compelling, psychedelicized darkness streaked with reassuring light. – David Fricke, Rolling Stone Magazine