Kandace Springs

國(guó)籍：美國(guó)

職業(yè)：爵士鋼琴演奏家

It’s the summons that dozens of young, gifted, beautiful female musicians have received over the past four decades, from Sheila E to Wendy & Lisa to Lianne La Havas. The call from Prince, in which he oozed admiration for your skills and invited you to his Paisley Park HQ in Minneapolis.

For Kandace Springs, a soul-jazz singer and pianist from Nashville, it was a message he sent to one of her social media accounts in 2014. “Hi,” it read (the i represented by the symbol of an eye, this being a pioneer of emojis).

介紹：One in a million musicians can say that they were invited by Prince to join him onstage. But it’s even more impressive for an artist to receive that endorsement before officially releasing a note of music. Yet that’s exactly what happened to Kandace Springs when His Royal Badness saw a YouTube clip of her performing Sam Smith’s hit “Stay With Me,” initiated a correspondence on Twitter, and asked Springs to fly to Minneapolis and perform at his legendary Paisley Park Studio.

Rather than be dazzled by the glamor or the ego boost, though, singer/songwriter Springs looks at the experience in terms of Prince’s longevity and work ethic. “I see the effect that he has on his fans, because he’s playing real music,” she says. “That’s what I want to stick to—making real music that’s going to last, and having a loyal fan base like his. And I think providing good stuff attracts good people.”

The four songs on the Kandace Springs EP (SRP/Blue Note)—a first taste of her forthcoming full-length album—illustrate her commitment to merging old-school values with fresh and innovative styles. Drawing on R&B, hip-hop, jazz, pop, and Latin music, Springs creates songs which reveal that out of all the lessons she has learned from her idols, from Billie Holiday to Lauryn Hill, the most essential rule is to stay fearlessly true to yourself.

Kandace Springs grew up surrounded by music; her father is a prominent session singer in Nashville. Yet as a girl, she was equally interested in other creative outlets, especially visual art and, more unexpectedly, automobiles. “My dad gave me a Matchbox car, a Thunderbird or something like that, and my mom gave me a Barbie,” she says. “I drew a mustache on the Barbie and never played with it again, and I still have the Matchbox car.” (Her obsession with cars, which she collects, rebuilds, and resells, continues to this day.)

When she was ten years old, though, her father brought an upright piano to their house as a favor for a neighbor who had been evicted from her home. Springs started banging on the instrument, and soon started lessons. A few years later, her father gave her a CD by Norah Jones, which inspired her to try singing on her own. “I performed a song of hers at camp,” she says, “and after I saw the response, I thought, ‘This is awesome—I wonder if I could make a living doing this?’”

A friend of her father’s played in a band with Evan Rogers and Carl Sturken, who have written hits for the likes of Shakira, Christina Aguilera, and Kelly Clarkson, and are best known for discovering and signing Rihanna as a teenager. Rogers heard an early demo that Springs recorded, and flew down to Nashville with an offer to sign her. Still only 17 years old at the time, she and her family decided that it wasn’t the right time to pursue music professionally, and she took a job at a local hotel, valet parking cars by day and singing in the lounge at night.

A few years later, Springs was talking about going to automotive design school, but her mother suggested that she get back in touch with Rogers and Sturken. “I texted Evan,” she says, “and he wrote back ‘Are you ready to be a star?’”

She came to New York and started working seriously on new songs and demo recordings. “At first I thought that maybe I would just be a jazz artist,” she says, “but working with Evan and Carl helped me get a more universal pop sound. And that was freeing, it felt so different.”

Springs was courted by several record companies, but felt that she found the right fit when A&R executive Eli Wolf brought her to Blue Note Records. She auditioned for label president Don Was with a performance of “I Can’t Make You Love Me”—a bold move, since Was produced Bonnie Raitt’s original recording. The songs on Kandace Springs, the first results of her work for the label, show the range of a style she describes as “classic soul meets modern hip-hop,” in both subject and sound.

Springs co-wrote two of the EP’s songs with Sturken and Rogers, who produced the tracks along with Wolf. The first single, “Love Got in the Way,” represents what Springs calls “my more fun, sassy Aretha side,” with a theme that’s easily relatable for most listeners. “Everybody has gotten distracted by somebody they like at some point,” she says, “everybody goes through that eventually.” The sultry “Forbidden Fruit” shows a different side of Springs, stripping her sound down to the intimacy of just her signature Fender Rhodes keyboard with the support of a sweet string arrangement.

The other two cuts were produced and co-written by the Philadelphia/Los Angeles-based team Pop & Oak (Nicki Minaj, Drake, Alicia Keys). On “West Coast,” her head-nodding hip-hop side comes out. “That song describes me,” says Springs. “I love the ocean, I love putting the top down and cruising. I love New York, but I’m a Cali girl.” The picture is rounded out by “Meet Me in the Sky,” which fuses a modern urban beat with bossa nova. “It’s a nice, sexy mix,” she says, “connecting two worlds that most people wouldn’t think to put together.”

Kandace Springs makes no secret of the grand tradition to which she aspires. “Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Erykah Badu, Roberta Flack—you can hear the influences in texture, tone, enunciation, but it’s still original, it’s still me,” she says. “I love how they’re all themselves, vocally and visually, and just don’t care what other people think.”

Springs views these singers, like the classic cars she loves, in terms of their timeless power, and hopes that her debut EP is the first step in a long creative journey. “I want to be one of those artists that lasts a long time,” she says, “not just a pop artist who gets up on the charts and then people forget about her. I want people to listen to my music a hundred years from now, play it at their weddings and all of it. And I think that takes being real—you can’t fake and pretend to be a different character when you sing. It’s got to come from the heart, and people can recognize that.

“So when I’m singing, I’m real. This is from my heart.”