Candice Night

Candice Night — American vocalist and songwriter — is the voice of Blackmore's Night, the project she created with guitarist Ritchie Blackmore in the mid-1990s. The group's formation was a complete break. Blackmore had been the guitarist of Deep Purple and Rainbow, two founding hard rock bands, and abandoned the genre to play Renaissance and folk music on period instruments. Night, his partner, became the vocalist and co-writer of that repertoire. Her voice is clear, without heavy vibrato and without rock projection — which is exactly what the music asks for. Singing over lute, bagpipes and violin demands restraint and clean intonation, not power; it is a register closer to early music than to anything Blackmore had done before. Blackmore's Night now spans more than two decades and a dozen records — longer, therefore, than Blackmore spent in Deep Purple and Rainbow combined. For part of the rock audience it is a hard choice to understand; for those who follow the project, it is a body of work coherent by its own criteria.