Chanteuse Keisha
Eighteen-year-old pop/R&B singer Keshia Chanté is a little dynamo. After releasing her self-titled debut album in 2004, which won numerous awards in her native Canada, she started working on the follow-up, 2U, her first U.S. release. And although she spent hours in the studio working with such songwriters and producers as Danja (Notorious B.I.G., Nelly Furtado, Justin Timberlake), Happy Perez (Ludacris), Matrax (Missy Elliott, P. Diddy) and Rock Wilder (Jay Z, Busta Rhymes), the girl still managed to finish high school with all her friends!
Zeeks: How were you able to graduate with all your friends?
Keisha: “It was so hard. I had eight courses to do in four months. I knew I was going to graduate. I just didn’t know if I was going to graduate with my class. I thought that was being a little ambitious because I missed 150 days of school and I was in Miami when they were sending me homework. So I did it while I was traveling. I did it on the plane. I did it at 3 o’clock in the morning when I got back from the studio. I did it during studio lunch breaks and dinner breaks.”
Zeeks: Why did you want to take that on along with recording your new album?
Keisha: “You feel like, ‘I know what I’m doing with my life. I don’t need to be doing this,’ but I love school so much. I always did. I was very motivated to do it. I just thought about my family and them being disappointed if they didn’t get to come to my graduation. I was also thinking about what I was going to say to my fans. It made me nervous to think if they ask me about school and I’d (have to) say, ‘Oh, I’m still in school,’ and I’m 18 or 19. I wanted to show my fans that anything you put your mind to, you can accomplish.”
Zeeks: It seems like memorizing your lyrics would be a bit like homework. “Stomp,” “Sorry” and “Too Much” are pretty lyrics-heavy!
Keisha: “I know them by heart. I’m not sure why or how I know them by heart, but I don’t practice the lines. I don’t know, I just do it in the studio and then I perform it. I never really look at the lyrics. The only time I ever rehearse my songs is to make sure my live show is great. My shows are live and I don’t lip-sync, so I try to work and rehearse over and over again so it sounds better than the record.”
Zeeks: The lyrics to a song such as “Kiss” — “I was working at the mall after school on a Friday/You were with your mom…” — are very youthful. Is it important to you to represent your demographic through your lyrics?
Keisha: “I want to make songs that are relatable. I do a lot of shows and I see who my fans are and I know how old they are, and, not only that, but ‘Kiss’ is a song for me. When I heard it, I just fell in love with it. So I figured that I’m going to make music that I love and that I want to share with other people, so something such as ‘Kiss’ or ‘Summer Love’ or ‘Stomp,’ those are records that I’m a fan of, so I recorded them.”