The young singer HER, 25, awarded the Grammy Award for best R’n’B album for her first record, H.E.R., in 2019, reappears (finally) in France. The only time this talented multi-instrumentalist could be seen on stage was in March 2019, already opening for her compatriot Childish Gambino. Since then, the health crisis has been there and despite a second album published in June 2021, Back of My Mind, the young woman has become rare.
It must be said that, since its inception, the one who chose an acronym for the artist name HER (Having Everything Revealed, literally “who reveals all”) cultivate mystery. Signed at the age of 14 on a Sony Music label, the guitarist invariably hides behind a pair of dark glasses.
“I wanted people to focus on the music instead of what I look like, what my name is and where I’m from”
When releasing his debut EP in 2016, H.E.R. Volume 1, she did not want to give any biographical information: “I wasn’t really protecting my identity, she says in an interview with the World. I just wanted to highlight my music. I wanted people to focus on the music instead of what I look like, what my name is and where I’m from. On social networks, we focus on looks, on superficial things. I wanted my music to resonate with the world, for the public to have no choice but to listen to it, to feel it. »
Little by little, the young woman revealed herself, helped by stubborn fans. Gabriella Wilson was born on June 27, 1997, in Vallejo, California, a city well known to hip-hop fans, as it is also that of rapper E-40, who launched the hyphy movement in the 2000s, whose watchword was « Get stupid » (“do the crazy”, in French). Daughter of an African-American musician and a nurse from the Philippines, « Gaby » going to have fun on these clownish rhythms, but her father, who gave her a guitar when she was 6, will put her back on the right track. “His school, and therefore mine, was older. At home, we listened to Sly and the Family Stone, Sheila E… My father also made me play James Brown, BB King, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, John Lee Hooker. Me, I loved Donny Hathaway, Alicia Keys…” It is moreover by taking up, at 10 years old, a piece of the latter, Fallin‘, and by broadcasting it on the Internet, that she is spotted.
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