YES YES YES...all by my lonesome. I suck at collaborating. Occasionally, I'll write and create melodies around beats that are given to me by Maleet (one of my producers). Other than that...give me a guitar or a piano and I'm good to go. I find writing music with other people, distracting...I don't like to f*** with my rotation. Besides, only I know what I want to say and how it should be sung. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Let the choir say A M E N!!
Any and every form of art and the poeple who dedicate themselves to creating art. If this were the 70's, I'd have flowers in my hair and roam around bra-less....wait, I already do that.
Sounds Like
the mountain tops and dandelions over a tight beat.
Record Label
Ill Friction/Strictly Rhythm
Type of Label
Indie
Mishal Moore is on TWITTER and FACEBOOK now!!'s Latest Blog Entry
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About Mishal Moore is on TWITTER and FACEBOOK now!!
Mishal Moore:"The Natural"
Singer/songwriter Mishal Moore discovered her true sound and ideal audience without the star-making machinery of commercial television, radio, or big corporations to guide her. Not that she didn't experiment with mainstream trends! A classically trained vocalist and musician with a strong background in musical theater, Moore began pursuing a recording career after mastering live performance skills that would've been the envy of many established pop and soul stars. But the first producers she encountered weren't sure how best to use this experience.
Perhaps knowing that her innate talent would make even cookie-cutter material sound above the ordinary, each individual producer of her first two independent albums encouraged Moore to mimic existing R&B trends rather than emphasize those aspects of her personal style that make her so charismatically different. That's why the wider public got their first look at a more stylistically distinctive Mishal through the Youtube page she created in 2006.
Uploading delightfully quirky D.I.Y. videos which combined comedy, musical performance, intimate autobiography, and experimental editing effects, she soon constructed a Mishal Moore "channel," where subscribers were being entertained by much more than an amateur video diary. A mere ten videos in, Moore came to the attention of Youtube programming czars who asked permission to "feature" one of her videos on the site. Beginning on July 22, 2007, Moore's acoustic performance of "When I Loved You" was spotlighted on the Youtube homepage for ten days.
"My video got close to a million hits," Moore recalled. " I didn't know the internet was capable of doing that! It was the moment it got set in stone for me that I need to continue doing this because I'm reaching a mass of people that I could never reach by myself on foot."
From then on, new media like MySpace and Youtube steadily increased Moore's live and virtual following. They avidly tracked down her work elsewhere in cyberspace. "People were buying more of my albums because I had my first two albums up on Itunes," says Moore, "But I ended up taking those albums down, because they weren't representative of what I was putting up on the videos." Moore won't insult loyal subscribers by calling them fanatics or "fans" for short. "I have followers, *supporters*" she emphasizes, happily.
Offers to collaborate with different musicians and studio beat meisters, as well as showcase at various clubs, kept coming. Letting her best instincts guide her, Moore accepted many of these offers--collaborating and experimenting, then posting the results online to appreciative reviews.
The songs she wrote and performed online with minimal accompaniment were an exhilarating departure from the songs on 2002's "Standing in the Rain: Vol. 1" and 2005's "Just Believe: Vol. 2". Even cover-songs she posted [like a Minnie Mouse version of Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine", and a heartbreaking rendition of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy"] were full of a compelling charm and vibrancy that is completely her own. Original material like the waltz-time "Soldier" and this spring's piano ballad "My Lullabye" were nuanced arrangements, beyond commercial categories like pop, soul, or rock. Youtube gave Moore the chance to display 360 degrees of her personality: the shy middle-class girl of Jamaican ancestry inspired by Disney cartoon musicals like *Pinocchio* and *Sleeping Beauty*; the high school actress who played "Frenchy" in the musical *Grease*, the bold teen entrepreneur who quit the prestigious Webster Conservatory in St. Louis to return to Florida and run her own non-profit theater troupe; and the aspiring soloist who once auditioned to sing back-up for Lauryn Hill.
With new compositions weekly adding to a repertoire of original material already deep into triple digits, Moore began contemplating her next move. Was it time to record a new album? An online pal put her in touch with a new collaborator named Maleet, who made beats. They started tinkering with songs and beat tracks in a casual way. After about three weeks he mentioned that he'd begun doing similar work with producer and label owner Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez, and wanted to show Mishal's songs to Kenny.
"Maleet let Kenny listen to some of my songs, and the rest is history," says Moore. "I'd been in Jersey since 2007. Near the end of 2008, I met Kenny, we talked, we got a vibe off of each other, and we started doing some things together, then he was like... 'I really wanna sign you to the label.' Only he didn't really say it like that, because I remember walking out the door and saying to my manager, 'Did he just offer me a record deal?' "
Moore may have been a little slow on the uptake because she'd spent 6 years pushing her career forward all on her own, and already had other people approach her, even from major labels. “I hadn't wanted to sign with a major label right away knowing how easily they could steal my hard earned creative control. "Why else would a major label want me?
I wasn't falling for that trick," Moore affirms. "I always wanted to get an independent label to work with, with major distribution. People said, 'you're never going to get that' but low and behold, that's what I have."
This summer, Mishal’s flagship single, “Oh Lord”, comes out on Kenny "Dope" Gonzalez's new Ill Friction label via Itunes. They plan to release the complete album by fall, but are still sorting through hundreds of potential tracks! The creative marriage between Moore and Gonzalez is as smooth and organic as her videos. Formerly one half of the internationally-known Masters At Work production duo, Kenny is no stranger to dynamic collaboration, and has worked with and for some of the world's most polished performers of salsa, jazz, funk, and pop soul.
As you'll hear on "Oh Lord", Kenny's approach to production is the same Promethean approach which produced classic hits by the Moonglows, Aretha, the JBs, Joe Cuba, The Shangri-Las, and yes, even Lauryn Hill. It's an approach where capturing raw emotion, acoustic textures and ad-libs makes a song come alive.
So if this is your first taste of Mishal Moore, get ready for a very pleasant surprise. If you are already familiar with her iconoclastic brand of 21st Century pop, go back to her Youtube channel and click through some of her most recent uploads. If only the winners of American Idol could have controlled their media image so well! Then consider that this is an artist who counts Jiminy Cricket as a mentor and listens to Judy Garland and T.I. on the same Ipod. Mishal Moore wants and intends to astonish her listeners, only not with a pyrotechnic bang, but with a soulful whisper that reminds her listeners not to let racial stereotypes limit what they enjoy, think or do. Here we have a songwriter who believes there is power in singing about the simple things of life and that we should appreciate human history, but not let our obsession with history blind us to our magical present or our potentially marvelous future.
-Carol Cooper
Mishal Moore is on TWITTER and FACEBOOK now!!'s Friend Space (Top 9)
Mishal Moore is on TWITTER and FACEBOOK now!! has 7648 friends.
Thanks so much for the add, your friendship and your kind words... I Love "Oh Lord" ... Soon in my next Top... Keep Up The Soulful Sound !!! Cheers from Paris.
I had a weird dream that we were mermaids...something like that. very odd...especially to be dreamin about yo ass, u owe me dreams of common and idris elba! hehe but i dont really remember too much. just the vivid colors. i wish i could paint...
What up? Its ya boy Nice just slidin thru to show love. Thanks for the add and the support its much appreciated. If u get a chance checkout my new tracks and pics. Keep doin ya thing, cuz Ima keep doin mine. Thanks again and PEACE.
Where do these people on the business side think they can crossover and turn into Diddy tryna tell me what to put in the beat like im on payroll... just silly. did u listen to the tracks?? that just topped everything off.
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