THE RETURN TO HEART SONG
Amun Starr began her musical journey as Elise LeBec. She cannot remember a day when she wasn’t playing the piano. By the age of six, she was already writing her own melodies at the piano, beginning a lifelong relationship with composition that would take her across continents, cultures, and musical genres.
At 18, she moved to Sydney, Australia, where she began composing original soundtracks for the paintings of internationally recognized artist Charles Billich. This early experience introduced her to the idea of music as a way of translating visual art and emotion into another language.
From Australia, she moved to England, where she signed a record deal and began writing pop songs while developing her voice alongside the piano. She traveled throughout England performing live and collaborating with established musicians and artists, including Mike Lindup of Level 42, Imogen Heap, and many others. These years expanded her musical vocabulary beyond classical and solo piano composition and taught her the craft of songwriting, performance, arrangement, and collaboration.
Eventually, she returned to the United States and came back to where her musical journey had begun: the piano. She returned to composing as a solo pianist and created Heart Song, a deeply personal solo piano album. The album found a devoted audience, reaching No. 1 on SiriusXM and remaining among the audience-selected Top 10 for more than eight years.
Amun has spent her entire life in music and has been a Grammy voting member for almost 20 years. Her career has taken her through multiple countries and multiple musical worlds, continually expanding her understanding of composition and performance.
In 2026, after decades of musical exploration, she returned to Heart Song with an entirely new perspective.
Her years in Egypt became a profound new chapter in her musical development. Immersing herself in Arabic music, working with orchestras, and collaborating with Egyptian musicians introduced her to Arabic scales, rhythms, instrumentation, and melodic traditions. She began exploring the meeting point between Arabic musical language and the Western melodies that had shaped her earlier work.
It was during this period of expansion that Elise LeBec became Amun Starr.
The name represented more than a change in identity. It reflected an artist who had expanded beyond the boundaries of her original musical world—an artist shaped by multiple cultures, countries, genres, and decades of experience.
And so, she returned to Heart Song not simply to reproduce it, but to reimagine it.
The new Heart Song transforms the intimate language of her original solo piano compositions into an orchestral work, bringing together the emotional foundation of the original album with everything she has learned throughout her musical journey.
It is the same artist who began writing melodies at six years old—now hearing those melodies through an entirely expanded world.
