Life's a funny old thing. You're a college student in Philadelphia studying business and fashion. You're an average singer, an OK pianist. Then you get knocked off your bike by a Jeep and suffer near fatal injuries to brain and body. During your recovery someone suggests music therapy as a way to repair the neural pathways. Lying half-paralysed on your back you teach yourself guitar and write a song about the accident - Some Lessons. You write some more tunes and without your permission someone puts some songs on the web. There is a big response to your music and you play some gigs; people cry when you sing Over the Rainbow. Then the major labels come knocking but you are slightly shocked at the speed of events and still suffering lingering disability (there's also the slight problem that you owe $100,000 in medical bills). The music business will call this hiatus “waiting for Gardot” but eventually Worrisome Heart appears on Universal.

Of course, if this wasn't much of a debut the story would fall flat. But Gardot has recorded nine simple but compelling tunes wrapped in the jazz-bluesy textures that Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux worked so successfully. Unlike them, though - or Eva Cassidy - all Gardot's recorded songs are her own. The voice is warm, languid with a touch of vibrato backed by acoustic guitar, lap steel and string bass. Only Some Lessons refers directly to the collision: “To think that I could have fallen a centimetre to the left/ would not be here to see the sunset.”

Elsewhere, Gardot muses on life and love. The title track is a late-night blues about a lonely woman with a messy past looking for affection. The gently rolling Sweet Memory with its lazy dobro could have come from O Brother, Where Art Thou? But just as it seems we're slipping into tasteful but undemanding Americana along comes the stand-out track - Love Me Like a River Does. Introduced with a piano flourish, it's a torch song worthy of Billie or Ella that many a wizened songwriter would have been delighted to call theirs.

Buy this album because it's a charming debut by a remarkable talent - or, if you like, just to help out a young woman with her medical bills.

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