Colbie Caillat

If you haven’t heard of Coblie Caillat yet, you've been missing out. Off her debut album CoCo, she already has two chart-topping hits with, “Realize” and “Bubbly." Her collaboration with Jason Mraz on the song “Lucky,” won her a 2010 Grammy Award for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. And oh yeah, her vocals and song writing on Taylor Swift's album Fearless, won her a 2010 Grammy for Album of the Year. Not too shabby for a guitar-playing, folk-singing sweetheart from Hawaii.

Caillat grew up in southern California and Hawaii listening to Bob Marley and Jack Johnson. Her musical influences are evident in her laidback, optimisitc, positive lyrics and harmonies. She is the daughter to acclaimed music producer Ken Caillat, who won Grammy's for co-producing Fleetwood Mac albums Rumors and Tusk.

Colbie first aspired to gain fame and success through American Idol, but she never made it past the pre-auditions, meaning she never had to face the harsh critiques of Simon Cowell. Turns out that she didn't need a golden ticket to Hollywood; her ticket to success was posting her original music to the social networking site myspace.com. After 42 million plays on her page, she landed a record deal after being the most popular singer in her genre on MySpace to not be signed to a record label. Caillat started collaborating with old friend, producer/songwriter Mikal Blue and singer/songwriter Jason Reeves. Collectively, they put together CoCo, which was released in 2007 and debuted at number five on Billboard’s Top 200 albums chart.

After such a successful debut, Caillat tried to push more boundaries with her aptly titled sophomore album, Breakthrough, which was released in August 2009. Ironically, Kara DioGuardi, one of the newest additions to the American Idol judging panel, helped write songs for Colbie's second album. The first single off this album, called “Falling for You,” was a smash hit. This upbeat single earned Caillat her highest debut on Billboard’s Hot 100 at the number 12 spot. The second single was released earlier this year and is called “I Never Told You," a song she wrote about a boyfriend who she broke up with before going on tour and the feelings she had about missing what they had. Another song off this album, “I Won’t,” was recently featured on the premiere of ABC Family’s new hit show, Pretty Little Liars.

With all of this success, Caillat does not show any signs of slowing down. Caillat was recently on an episode of the Food Network reality show, “Next Food Network Star.” She is also currently writing and recording songs for her third studio album, which is slated to be released as early as November of this year.

You can see Caillat perform live in concert at the Churchill Downs Race Track in Louisville, KY as one of the acts at the Hullabalou Music Festival on Friday, July 23.