Emeli Sande

Emeli Sandé is no stranger to crowds—she performed to roughly a billion people at the 2012 Summer Olympics—but she knows that music’s deepest meaning is often experienced alone.

“To be able to have that privacy with someone is something I don’t take for granted,” she tells Apple Music.

That duality resonates in the Scottish singer/songwriter’s unique brand of adult-contemporary soul music, which focuses her powerhouse voice on more intimate questions of honesty and self-knowledge.