London's A Long Way From Nashville But New Artist Ilona Finds Common Ground In A "Beautiful Country"

New York, NY (Top40 Charts) On April 12th 2015, emerging artist ILONA releases a new record called BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY that astutely (and warmly) observes many of the differences between American and UK culture. Recognising that Country Music often references things that don't always translate that well across the Atlantic, the song seeks to celebrate the one thing that we do both share, one Beautiful Country called Love.

Although recorded in London, it was important to ILONA that both the spirit and the audio of the song captured a sense of Nashville. During a chance meeting at a Christmas party she asked legendary British pedal steel guitarist BJ Cole if he would play on the track. BJ's long career includes performing on many of the early Elton John hits like Tiny Dancer, and after hearing a demo of the song BJ said " I will work on 'Beautiful Country' because it would be a crime not to. For such a young singer she has an amazingly mature command of many different styles of music ".

Fast forward 3 months, and the song has now been recorded, mixed and prepared for release with BJ Coles masterful work intricately underpinning the songs Country roots.

The song has been produced by Tony Moore (ex Iron Maiden and Cutting Crew) and will be released on his newly established label, miniMAJOR Music, and distributed by Absolute via Universal. Tony says "ILONA's brilliant live performance of this song both in the USA and the UK always get such a fantastic reaction from audiences that we knew it had to be the next single"

ILONA will be hosting a single launch event at The Distillers W6 in Hammersmith, West London on April 17th following which there is a tour being put together including 3 weeks of shows in Manhattan and upstate New York.