Keshia was recently interviewed by Nicki Thomas from the Toronto Star as the countdown to this Sunday's Juno Awards is winding up. You can read the interview in full below and check out some of the highlights. Don't forget to tune into the 2011 Juno Awards on Sunday March 27th, 2011 8pm ET/ 9pm AT to see if our Canadian princess will take home her two Juno Nominations. She will also be presenting an award as well, so stay tuned for that.
Source: thestar.com
Toronto Star Interview:
Nicki Thomas
Staff Reporter
By all appearances, Keshia Chanté is an adult.
She’s got her own place in Yorkville, a yen for high fashion and a couple of high-profile romances to her name. That doesn’t stop the Ottawa-born singer, just 13 when she picked up her first major music award, from acting like a kid.
“I operate very young sometimes. Last week I met Minnie Mouse for the first time and I almost cried. I legitimately almost cried,” she says with a laugh. “I was so excited.”
Chanté will celebrate her 23rd birthday in June, shortly after the release of her third album, Night & Day. Her first two albums already spawned 8 Top-10 hits, and earned her 6 Canadian Urban Music Awards and a Juno. Now, two singles from the new album have nabbed nominations at this Sunday’s Juno awards in Toronto.
Test Drive, from the Day side of the album, is up for best R&B/Soul Recording of the Year, the category she won in 2005. Table Dancer, a synth-heavy track from the Night side, is in the running for Best Dance Recording of the Year.
Chanté says she’s most excited about the R&B nomination because, like all the songs from Day, the material for Test Drive came straight from the pages of her diary. Its songs are very personal but very relatable, she says, and deal mostly with being “in love, heartbroken, over it.” (Previously linked to Drake, Chanté is now reportedly dating hockey goalie Ray Emery, who appears in the Test Drive video.)
The burst of songwriting came after a period of working with several different songwriters and producers, including Neo and the teams behind Missy Elliot and Andre 3000, but feeling disconnected from the work, she says.
“Everything they do is kind of branded in their sound. I needed to figure out, ‘what’s my sound, what do I do?” she says. “I ended up writing a lot of stuff but it was dark and moody. Once I got that all out of my system, I started making Table Dancer and a bunch of other dance songs. Then I had two bodies of work that were literally like night and day and it just made sense.”
Set U Free, penned by ubiquitous pop collaborator Taio Cruz, is the album’s only song from an outside writer. While Chanté says she felt territorial about adding it to the album, the infectious tune fit with Night’s vibe, which is “all about having fun.”
“I love what’s going on with radio right now. There are a lot of dance records, but it’s all feel-good music,” she says. “I want to be part of that.”
The song’s racy lyrics (“Got your body all over me, then you leave me / What you need, you can get from me / Don’t you know that I can set your body free”) aren’t an attempt to distance herself from a younger image, Chanté says.
“I heard it and I loved it and I felt right about it. If you’re honest in your work and you’re honest as a person, there’s really no image. There’s just you.”
Chanté says people around her never forced to be a certain way.
“They’ve always given me say but I didn’t know what I wanted, so it didn’t really matter,” she says. “Now, more than ever, I’m sure of what I want.”
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