In the world of entertainment, timing is everything. For an artist like Kreesha Turner, that time is now. The Canadian siren has been making tidal waves in her home market, but Kreesha is ready to take America by storm. Evolution is inevitable.
Kreesha Turner was born in Canada in Edmonton, Alberta, yet spent most of her years traveling back and forth to her mother’s former home of Jamaica. “A lot of people whose parents are immigrants, never go back to their home country,”Kreesha explains. “The first time I traveled to Jamaica, I was eight months old, and I went every year growing up.”Kreesha absorbed the rich musical history of Jamaica, from Reggae to Dancehall, even attending high school there for the first half of her schooling. Once she graduated high school in Canada, she began her full-time pursuit of music. As any artist that is serious about their career should, Kreesha emerged herself in the local music scene, as she was heavily on the Western Canadian Hip Hop front. She made the exodus to Toronto by 2006 after meeting her first manager, and it wasn’t long before the wheels were in motion. “I was signed pretty quickly out of the gate,”she says.“I was signed in 2006, and I’ve been doing music full-time ever since.”
2008 marked the year everything came together, as Kreesha dropped her debut album Passion. The project yielded the Platinum single “Don’t Call Me Baby,”with Juno Award nominations for Best New Artist and Pop Album of the Year. In addition, Turner won the Canadian Radio Music Award for Best New Group/Solo Artist and was nominated for a MuchMusic Video Award for International Video of the Year by a Canadian. While the first half of Kreesha’s career was fruitful, she still felt stifled. The pressures to be a Pop star by her label at the time led to her diluting a sound that was full of so many cultures, yet it had to fit with a formulaic mainstream equation. In 2011, Kreesha dropped her follow-up album Tropic Electric, nominated for another Juno Award, this time for R&B/Soul Recording of the Year. The album was half-recorded in Jamaica, and Kreesha felt as though she “regained control of the steering wheel”on the project. “I was once again allowed to infuse my Jamaican roots back into my music,”she recalls. “I got to put back the dialect (Patois) that I like to throw in there and I mixed it with the electronic/dance sound that was starting to dominate the Pop charts at the time. To appease the label, I was like okay, I’m going to mix dance music with Jamaica, and I did that on my second album.”
As Kreesha readies her third album, Evolution Inevitable, her vow of authenticity remains in tact. The greater whole of Evolution Inevitable was recorded in Los Angeles, as Kreesha and her team comprised of co-writer Daaron Anthony and producer Yonni (formerly known as Young Yonny) were inspired by the West Coast. “I think it definitely needed to be created in the U.S., and what better place than L.A.?”Kreesha explains. “L.A., apart from New York, is one of the main music hubs of the U.S. and I got to be in the thick of it in a sense.”Tracks like the hypnotic “MJ”and “Gimme Dat”lean on Sangeet samples, as Kreesha infuses her slick Patois into the cuts. Other tracks like “Put It Down”and “Badboy”scream Dancehall, while “Turn Me On”is a quintessential Pop single. When you’ve had the success and walked the diverse soil that Kreesha Turner has, there truly is “something for everybody”on her debut crossover album. “I just hope that people find something nostalgic yet new and completely different all at the same time,”Kreesha says of Evolution Inevitable. “We infused elements that we felt would cause people to say, ‘Oh, that sounds familiar, yet like nothing else i’ve ever heard before! I like it!’. The project will be released via Kreesha’s distribution deal with Universal Music Canada and in the U.S. independently with the strength of her power house manager, Nick Cannon; N’Credible Entertainment. Kreesha’s meeting with the mogul was completely serendipitous, as Cannon was a secret fan before it all. One fateful evening, Kreesha showed up at a club event Nick was deejaying. “As I came in, Nick shouted me out on the mic like, ‘Kreesha Turner in the building!’I was like, ‘How does he know who I am?’”she recalls. A meeting led to a management contract, and the rest as they say, is history.
The stage is now set for Kreesha Turner to bring her unique take on music across the border. Evolution Inevitable is the first brick in the foundation of Turner’s transformation into an American star. “The U.S. may not have heard of me yet, but I’ve traveled the world and performed on stages with some of the biggest names in music,”she says. “I feel blessed to be able to say i do music for a living, and it definitely feels like the American audience is looking for something a little more rooted. To me, there’s nothing more rooted than Reggae, and I feel that my project will feed the peoples’ hunger, giving many exactly what they’ve been looking for.”