Born in Calabasas, California (USA) on 10 September 1964, Donna Delory is an American singer. She made her professional singing debut at the age of eight singing a Recipe dog food commercial. She moved to Nashville with her father and brother at the age of 16 following the death of her mother from breast cancer in 1980. Her father found a professional home in Nashville’s Music Row area as a producer for Capitol Records. Delory made friends with a few songwriters and became inspired by seeing how much effort they put into their work. She started spending a lot of her time on writing songs and recording demos before going back to California after finishing Hillsboro High School to study dancing, singing and acting.
She first came to the public’s attention as Madonna’s background vocalist. Her boyfriend Gardner Cole wrote the song ‘Open your heart’ and was asked to record a demo with a female voice – Donna’s. Madonna’s producer Patrick Leonard liked her voice and used her for subsequent projects. Via him Donna also got to tour with Madonna on all her world tours from 1987 until 2007.
In 1992 Donna released her debut self-titled album on MCA Records. The second album was not released until 2002. In 1994, she left MCA because her growing interest in world music was starting to show in her own music, much to the dismay of her label who wanted her to keep making pop music. She toured France as a backing vocalist and dancer for Mylène Farmer in 1996 and appears on the live CD/DVD Live à Bercy. She formed the band Bliss together with cellist Cameron Stone in 1997, whom she was introduced to at the recommendation of her drummer, and released the album ‘Love Never Dies’. However, they decided to rename the album to ‘Bliss’ and bill it to De Lory’s name because there already were too many other bands with ‘Bliss’ in their name and Donna already had name recognition from her first album and her work with Madonna.
Between 2002 and 2018, Delory released nine albums, the last of which was ‘Here In Heaven’, which contains a cover version of Never Be Mine.
References
- Donna De Lory. Wikipedia, retrieved 10 June 2019.
