Turner’s Tropic hybrid of Jamaica and Top 40 dance
Singer takes sophomore album by the steering wheel
Don’t call Kreesha Turner baby anymore.
The 26-year-old Edmonton singer, who broke through with her 2008 hit, Don’t Call Me Baby, from her debut album, Passion, picking up two Juno Award nods along the way and drawing comparisons to Rihanna and Duffy, is back with a more sophisticated and diverse sound on her 2011 sophomore double disc, Tropic Electric.
So far it’s spawned two singles — Rock Paper Scissors and I Could Stay.
The disc’s two sides reflect Turner’s love of her mother’s birthplace, Jamaica, the latter where she recorded much of it with female producer The Wizard at 7 Long Studios in Kingston, and the R&b - dancepop music from her first record.
“I am in this industry today because of Jamaica,” said the admitted fashionista Turner, decked out in Canadian designer Mackage at her label offices in Toronto recently.
“I didn’t start singing until I was 16 when I went to school and lived on the island. So to me, like I said, Jamaica is that part of me that turned on the music bug that I got. And for my first album, Passion, it was very pop. And pop right now is the electric, the David Guetta sound, the Lady Gaga, that whole dance world has just taken over Top 40. I was starting off creating a hybrid. It eventually became a double disc just so that we could explain what I was doing, both by the title of the album and then (fans) could see it physically with the two different CDS.”
In honing a new sound, Turner also got more involved in the writing of the new record, co-writing all of the songs, in Jamaica, Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York and Toronto.
“This time around, I got to literally take this one by the steering wheel,” said Turner who is currently in tour rehearsals with dates as an opener on a Canadian tour yet to be announced.
“I recorded it in Jamaica and I wanted to grab that authentic energy of Jamaica, they hear music differently on the island, they dance differently than the rest of the world so I wanted to be absorbed and consumed by it while creating this album. Recording in L.A. and New York a lot of the times, it’s about a formula, we have to work. In Jamaica, to them music is all about energy, it’s all about vibes. Somedays we’d show up at the studio and they’d be like, ‘You feel like working today? Let’s go the beach. You can get some lobster or something.’ They don’t want to force anything.”
It could have been all Tropic, Turner admits, but she didn’t want to turn her back on the success in the U.S. with both Don’t Call Me Baby and Dust In Gravity (her 2010 collaboration with Vancouver alt-pop band Delerium) going to No. 1 on the Billboard dance remix charts.
Female influences are i mportant to the singer, who has opened for Lady Gaga and performed with Shirley Bassey and Katy Perry at Fashion Cares in Toronto.
The grande dame Bassey made a major impression.
“Shirley’s like this Sinatra, she just has this old New York, Broadway vibe about her, she just emits a light and it was so humbling to meet her. She was like, ‘Oh, ladies, you have to look cute!’ She just had that old swagger. We got to ask her, ‘How do you do it?’ And she was like, ‘Honey, just keep working!’ ”