Support Women Artist Sundays: India.Arie

India.Arie (born India Marie Simpson; October 3, 1975) is a Grammy Award-winning American soul, R&B, and neo soul musician, songwriter, and producer. She has sold over 3.3 million records on U.S. and 10 million worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards and received 18 nominations, including Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best New Artist.

Simpson was born in Denver, Colorado. She absorbed musical skills early in life as she was encouraged by both parents. Her mother Joyce is a former singer (she was signed to Motown as a teenager and opened for Stevie Wonder and Al Green) and is now her stylist. She has an older brother named J'On. After her parents divorced, Simpson's mother moved the family to Atlanta, Georgia when she was thirteen. Simpson had taken up a succession of musical instruments throughout her schooling in Denver, but her interest in the guitar while attending the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Savannah, led to a personal revelation about songwriting and performing. "When I started tapping into my own sensitivity, I started to understand people better. It was a direct result of writing songs", she said at the press release of her debut album, Acoustic Soul.

Co-founding the Atlanta-based independent music collective Groovement EarthShare (Groovement was the collective artists' name and EarthShare was their independent label name), her one-song turn on a locally-released compilation led to a second-stage gig at the 1998 Lilith Fair. In 1999, a Universal/Motown music scout spotted her and made an introduction to former Motown CEO Kedar Massenberg. Arie currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia.

via Wikipedia

I Am Not My Hair The Heart of the Matter

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