New Zealand pop singer and songwriter Annabel Fay was born October 23, 1988, in Auckland, the daughter of multimillionaire Sir Michael Fay. She loved music even as a child, and had made plans to study vocal performance and audio engineering at Columbia College in Chicago, but that plan was derailed when a music promoter heard her sing at a New Zealand holiday party, convinced her to record a few demos, and then shopped them to Siren Records, which signed Fay and released a debut single, "Lovin' You," in 2006, when she was still only 19 years old. The single hit the Top Ten in New Zealand. An album was recorded, produced by Brady Blade, and appeared from Siren Records in 2007 as the self-titled Annabel Fay. The album did well enough that Fay was signed to EMI Records, which issued her sophomore album, Show Me the Right Way, in 2011. Critics weren't that kind to it, though, particularly when it was learned that Fay had received a considerable subsidy from the New Zealand government to record it, a move that many perceived as unnecessary given her father's vast wealth. The album did reach number eight on New Zealand's Top 40 albums chart, however, and a third studio project, Brave the Rain, was released in the summer of 2012. ~ Steve Leggett