RECENT ARTICLES

Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter, JoJo (born Joanna Levesque), needs to write. The act is part of her self-care, part of a crucial regular practice. If she doesn’t put pen to paper, her mind can become more of a minefield. It can be dangerous up there, she says. The writing could be journaling or jotting; it does not need to be public or poetic. But it needs to happen. And at one point recently, the writing wasn’t coming for Jojo. She felt stifled.

At the time, the last thing she’d composed was a holiday album in July. It had been six months since she’d written and it was becoming painful. Coupled with the creative inertia, JoJo was experiencing severe bouts of depression and anxiety. She reached out to her record label and told them she needed to write about what was going on in her brain. And she began to do just that. This is the origin story of JoJo’s sleek, stellar new record, trying not to think about it, which is out now.

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At first, Florence LaRue didn’t want to be in the famous R&B group from the ‘60s and ’70s, The 5th Dimension—a band that was also recently reintroduced to audiences thanks to the recent documentary, Summer of Soul, from The Roots’ famed drummer Questlove. She’d just won a beauty pageant—the Miss Bronze California contest—and one of the group’s founders, Lamonte McLemore, had approached her but she declined, thinking McLemore would have asked anyone who’d won the contest. So, she sloughed him off.

At the time, LaRue was in school, in the final year of getting her bachelor’s degree. She was also working full-time. So, she told McLemore that she wouldn’t even be able to make many rehearsals. But he persisted and eventually, LaRue acquiesced. The rest is music history. But none of this would have happened, LaRue says, if it hadn’t have been for the actress (and former Catwoman) Eartha Kitt.

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Sebastián Yatra is a heartthrob superstar. He’s also a darn fine songwriter. Yatra, who was born in Colombia and raised in Miami, Florida, now has legions of fans numbering in the tens of millions. He’s collaborated with the Jonas Brothers, covered Elvis Costello, with the singer’s blessing, and he’s currently on tour with Enrique Iglesias and Ricky Martin, idols who Yatra looked up to as a kid.

Now, though, he’s sharing their same air. This is what comes when you’re a Latin Grammy Award-nominated artist, what follows you when you garner millions of song streams in a matter of days. Yatra, who released his most recent hit, “Tarde,” two weeks ago, even more recently earned a Latin Grammy nomination for his earlier 2021 single, “Adios.” That song, which has its own unique backstory, came to the artist in a matter of moments.

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Portland, Oregon-born, Grammy-winning musician, Esperanza Spalding, remembers walking the dog with her mother. In fact, it’s her first memory. During the excursion, Spalding remembers asking her mother to harmonize with her, trying to turn multiple tones into something more. It made sense for the young child who begged her parents to play Harry Belafonte’s and Stevie Wonder’s Christmas albums year-round. She says another turning point in her early life was hearing a Bach cello suite on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It gave her the chills, even then. Some few decades later, Spalding is a towering figure in music, with both street cred and Harvard University props, multiple Grammy Awards, and now a new LP, Songwrights Apothecary Lab, out today (September 24).

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New Orleans-based, booming-voiced artist, Big Freedia, knows life in all its glory, terror and variety is, in the end, about balance. So, to keep her own mind balanced during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Freedia took to two main outlets: cooking and recording music. For the former, Freedia took to social media and YouTube to produce modest-though-beloved cooking videos, showing viewers how she makes various favorites, like biscuits. For the former, Freedia wrote and recorded in the studio and has since recently made that work public, releasing her latest EP, Big Diva Energy, earlier in September. The album, which comes on the heels of her 2020 EP, Louder, is itself a triumphant exercise in balance. On the EP, Freedia discusses both personal boundaries and fun, food-based gluttony.

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