Profile of Skye Sweetnam on Famous Like Me

Skye Alexandra Sweetnam (born May 5, 1988 in Bolton, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian rock singer of the early 2000s. She released her first single, "Billy S.", in 2003; it appears on her first album, Noise from the Basement, which was released on September 21, 2004. This CD features 13 songs, including the singles "Tangled Up In Me" and "Number One". Sweetnam has also guest starred on the television show Radio Free Roscoe, to which she sings the theme song.

She is currently working on her second album.

Background

Skye, named after the Isle of Skye in Scotland, grew up in the small Toronto suburb of Bolton, where she studied dancing and singing from a young age. By her early teens she had moved on to songwriting, and recorded a demo with the help of a local Bolton music school. She worked with local producer and instrumentalist, James Robertson. Together, Robertson and Sweetnam worked on what would later become Noise from the Basement, her Capitol Records debut. The single "Billy S." appeared in July 2003 on the soundtrack to the Mandy Moore movie How to Deal, quickly took off in the US and Canada. In 2002 Sweetnam went on tour over Europe and North America, as the opening act of Britney Spears, although her part was cut short when she got the flu. On tour she showed off a sense of humour, saying "Anyone that falls asleep on the [tour] bus is going to get Sharpie on their face saying, 'Skye was here.'"

Volio

Her first single, "Billy S.", was the center of attention when many teenagers posted the lyrics online as "Meet Juliet or my Volio" as opposed to "Meet Juliet or Malvolio". The word Volio has since developed a cult following as an example of a mondegreen (a misheard and misinterpreted song lyric).

The song's title is a reference to William Shakespeare. Within the song, Sweetnam uses Shakespeare as a symbol for institutional education and the subsequent constrictive authority that is attached with it. With this in mind, the song demolishes this symbol, in a lyrical fit of teenage angst and rebellion. The lines referencing this are located within the chorus:

"I don't need to read Billy Shakespeare, meet Juliet or Malvolio.

Feel for once what it's like to rebel now. I want to break out. Let's go!"

The characters Juliet (from Romeo and Juliet) and Malvolio (from Twelfth Night) were taken from plays by Shakespeare. However, many young Sweetnam fans, having never read those plays, were unaware of character names, and subsequently many incorrect versions of the lyrics of "Billy S." were posted on online lyrics websites. The most common mistake was that of the line "Meet Juliet or my Volio" instead of "Meet Juliet or Malvolio".

This common mistake soon spread across the internet on various lyric-based websites, despite Volio not being a word or a phrase. As a result, many intenet users have adopted this word as their own, giving Volio its official definition as "a polio-infected Swedish automobile". This definition views the word Volio as a hybrid combining the disease polio and the Swedish Volvo, a manufacturer of cars.

It is now commonly used in internet slang, used to refer to any lyrical typo or misunderstanding.

Discography

• Noise from the Basement (2004)
• LOVE for NANA (released in Japan only)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Skye Sweetnam