61 In-spire
LS
True fans of music are constantly tuning
in and out of radio stations and trawling
the internet looking for something new for
their iPods to have a love affair with. If your
quests for non-stop eargasms often come up
short, you probably haven't come across this
month's 1 2 Watch yet.
The sultry, jazzy tones of 28-year-old South
Londoner, Shea, offer a refreshing change
to the generic auto-tuned vocals that seem
to be a permanent fixture in the popular
music chart. With her current single Where
Did You Go doing the rounds, and an
album due to drop in the summertime, I
chat with Shea about the
music industry, rainbow
coloured fingernails
and what makes women
amazing.
Shea, found out she
could sing very early on,
noticing her peers would
often sound out of tune in comparison to
her. But it was when she started listening
to Lauryn Hill that she was able to develop
the true beauty of her own voice, "Her
singing was all about her voice and how
she sounded and not her range," She tells
me. Like most girls, her attempts to match
the vocal acrobatics on Whitney Houston's
songs were near on impossible, but she says
of Lauryn Hill, "Hearing someone focus
more on the tone and texture of their voice,
I realised that's what I needed to work on
trying to sound nice rather than hit all those
crazy notes."
And sound nice she does indeed, you only
need to take a trip over to her Soundcloud
or do a YouTube search for proof of that.
A YouTube search would also throw up
Attacca Pesante's Make it Funky For Me,
which features Shea's vocals. This was her big
break so to speak, as the income generated
from the success of the track allowed her
to concentrate on making music full time.
However, a now industry savvy Shea offers a
cautionary tale to anyone thinking that they
will be rolling in cash from the sales of their
track, "To make money from sales, you have
to make a hell of a lot of sales. I don't know
anyone that has made a lot of money from
sales, it's from the exposure that
comes after," I'm told by Shea,
who has managed to sustain
herself by doing PA's, session
singing, and writing for other
artists.
To give you a feel for the kind
of artist Shea is, Grey Skies and
Rainbow Fingernails, her debut album,
was recorded with a live band with tracks
penned by her. The curious title is homage
to London town with its dreary skies, but
also to a line from one of the songs on the
record called Making Lemonade. "One of
the lyrics is if something goes wrong I paint
my fingernails rainbow, and that's something
I always do, I've always got multicoloured
nails," Shea says, also explaining that the
album title is reflective to the varying moods
of songs which draw on Latin, Jazz and
Reggae influences.
Shea
1 2Watch
"Laura Mvula, Adele and
Emeli Sande are proof
that you don't always
have to `fit the mould'
in order to achieve
mainstream success"
Words by Taytula Burke @Teebeewrites