Blue Stone (music group)

Blue Stone's style and genre have been described as "Ethereal Pop," "Ambient Pop," "Dream Pop," and "New Age" by critics. Their music integrates layered hardware and software synthesizers with live piano, vocals, and percussion.

Robert Smith and Bill Walters are the group's core members, who write the majority and produce all of Blue Stone's output. They collaborate with various female guest vocalists, some of whom are credited as co-writers of songs. Prior to forming Blue Stone, Smith released music in the New Age genre as Bella Sonus. He and Walters have experience performing together as bandmates in Rock and Blues projects in prior decades. The two have cited a variety of musical artists, including Pink Floyd, Jan Hammer, William Orbit, Delerium, BT, and Afro Celt Sound System, as having been influential in developing their sound. ^{[1] [2]}

Blue Stone's first studio album, Breathe, was released in 2006 and received mixed reviews. Breathe features one guest vocalist, Darcy, on numerous songs, which are a combination of free-form composition and traditional verse/chorus songwriting. The album performed well on the iTunes Store's Electronic Album Chart Top 100.^[3][4] Worlds Apart was released in 2007 to uniformly positive reviews,^[5] and included three guest vocalists (Rivers, Sandlin, and Hurley), each performing on multiple songs. This album represented a shift toward a majority of conventionally written (verse/chorus-type) songs that continued in the 2009 release Messages, which was also well received by critics. ^{[6] [7]}