Meet Jhene Aiko. Or maybe you already have? Many of you may be trying to jog your memory from this familiar face because you may have seen her in the early 2000's during the whole boy band B2K craze. She was always promoted as member Lil Fizz's "Cousin" (which she has no relation) and had a couple songs with the boy band and even landed a song on the 2002 movie "Barbershop" soundtrack called "Sneaky". The then 15 year old L.A native was set to release her debut album in 2002 and shot a video called "NO L.O.V.E" that debuted on BET soon after. The album never came out as she explains in her recent Vibe Magazine interview she says:
"It actually didn’t drop because something had happened at Epic [Records]. My A&R got fired and all this crazy stuff, so I ended up just asking for a release from Epic and from TUG, and I just started to focus more on school. You know, I was still singing, and I was still working with a couple of the producers that I had met while I was signed, but I was more focused on school. Then, I got pregnant when I was 20. Like, I took my last meeting a couple of weeks before I found out I was pregnant"
Jhene and her then boyfriend O'Ryan ( R&B singer Omarion's Younger brother) welcomed a baby girl named Namiko Love in 2008. The now 23-year old has new material and released a mixtape called "Sailing Soul(s)" about a month ago and has reached more than 500,000 downloads in just 5 weeks. Jhene says the idea about working on a mixtape started on the social site twitter:
"I was on Twitter one day and said something about selling your soul, but I spelled it wrong and Chase N. Cashe corrected me. I put “sailing souls” and he said, ‘Oh, that would be a nice name for an album.” And everything started happening after that"
Jhene released her 1st single from Sailing Soul(s) called " Sailing NOT Selling" ft Kanye West but one of the most popular songs from this effort is definitely track #2 called "Stranger". Her voice on this mellow track seems effortless and the melody will definitely get stuck in your head. I, personally love the entire mixtape and have been playing it non-stop for weeks now, #SlausonStandUp! check out "Stranger" out below:
Download Sailing Soul(s) HERE.
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