She really isn't a newcomer: Beth Hart, the little Californian with the big voice, has been active in the music mecca Los Angeles since the early 90s, would have become by a hair the voice of the Stone Temple Pilots and the Gunners successor Velvet Revolver, and can look back on three successful albums. If she hadn't had to struggle with many private problems at the beginning of the new millennium, she would have been a superstar today. The 34-year-old not only has the voice of a Janis Joplin, she also writes strong, earthy songs, in which she turns her entire inner life to the outside, and presents herself to the listener quite openly. In "Lifts you up" she searches for new positivism, confesses her drug past ("I went from zero to minus ten") in the title song, searches for the great love in "World without you" and conjures up her happy existence as a clarified human being in "Learning to live".