Female singers and their stories

Hi everyone, today I wanted to share the stories of a few talented female singers which I like. I hope you find it interesting!

Vérité is the stage name of a singer-songwriter called Kelsey Byrne from New York. Meaning ‘truth’ in French, this stage name is perfect, since her lyrics are all about truth and honesty. When asked about the meaning of her resounding lyrics, Kelsey answered, ‘people can really ascribe their own meaning, which I kind of encourage.’

Eliza Berman, a writer for The Times, believes that she ‘writes songs about the human condition: what it’s like to be here, to inhabit your own mind, to try to connect with others.’

Listen to her music here.

Selah Sue is a Belgian musician who has a certain raspy, almost reggae quality to her voice which is so rare nowadays.

At just seventeen, she was offered a contract with Universal which she refused, because she wanted to sing her own songs. She managed to balance her growing music career with studying psychology at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven.

In her opinion, this helped her to ‘understand more about human emotions’, which is important in her song writing.

Listen to her music here.

Banks, originally named Jillian Rose Banks, is an alternative pop singer-songwriter. She taught herself piano, which she received from a friend to help her through her parents’ divorce. Banks describes her feelings at that time: ‘very alone and helpless. I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling or who to talk to.’

She explains that music helps her release her emotions, meaning she kept her music private while she earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Vogue magazine described her music as being able to ‘perfectly capture a feeling of being lost and powerless in the world’, and I couldn’t agree more.

Listen to her music here.

Okay, so this last one may be cheating a little bit since Florence and the Machine is technically a band, but for the purpose of this post Florence is a solo singer 😉

Florence had a rather difficult childhood, with her parents separating when she was just four. Consequently herself, along with her mother and two younger siblings, were forced to move in with their next door neighbour. There, Florence ‘just used to stay in [her] room and dance around.’

At ten, she witnessed the deterioration and death of her grandfather following a stroke. Four years later her grandmother, suffering from bipolar disorder, committed suicide. Florence, still a young girl, sang at both of her grandmothers’ funerals, and they were such big influences on her life that she went on to write multiple songs about them that feature on her debut album, Lungs.

At school, Florence was constantly getting in trouble for impromptu singing. After leaving school she attended an Arts college, but decided to take a year out to ‘see where the music would go and then it started going somewhere so [she] never went back’.

Listen to her music here.

I think it is important to understand and appreciate the story behind the artists we listen to, and I hope that you found this interesting!

-Evie ❁