KANDACE SPRINGS

Soul-infused jazz from Prince-championed Nashville chanteuse.

Kandace Springs’ twin passions are music and cars. In fact, the 27-year-old singer/pianist admits she’s just as comfortable changing spark plugs under the bonnet of her Corvette as sitting at a Steinway grand. “It all started when my dad gave me a little Hot Wheels car,” she laughs. “My mum gave me a Barbie. I drew a moustache on it and laughed my ass off. But I’ve got the Hot Wheels car to this day. I just love cars. I can do tune-ups, change plugs… all that shit.” But all thoughts of becoming a professional racer took a back seat to her music career, which is now taking off via her Blue Note debut album, Soul Eyes. Springs might like her cars speedy and loud but she makes music that’s slow, soft and sensuous. Her low-key, jazz-drizzled ballad style has been compared with Roberta Flack and Norah Jones and, inspired by the latter, Springs took up the piano at 13 and was soon performing in public. She played regularly at a hotel bar in her home city of Nashville before signing to the management company of R&B producers Carl Sturken and Evan Rogers, who discovered Rihanna. Springs joined Blue Note in 2013 after a live audition for the label’s boss, Don Was. “That was pretty crazy

“PRINCE GAVE ME A HARD TIME ABOUT THE HIP HOP STUFF.”

because we were in Studio A in the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles,” she reveals. “I sang Bonnie Raitt’s I Can’t Make You Love Me and he said, ‘That’s one of the best arrangements that I’ve ever heard of that song,’ and then told me he produced the original. I didn’t know that and freaked out.” The first thing she recorded for Blue Note was a hip hop-influenced EP, but dissatisfied with her musical direction, she went back to the drawing board and focused on a more intimate, organic approach. Prince got to see one of her online videos and contacted her. “He directly messaged me on Twitter,” she reveals. “I didn’t believe it at first. The next thing, I was on an airplane, first class, out to Minneapolis.” She sang with his band, went to a movie with him, and then they did some bike-riding together around Paisley Park. He had some sage advice for her, though: “He told me to stop doing the hip hop stuff,” she says. “He was always giving me a hard time about it.” Prince got to hear the finished album before his death – “Novocaine Heart was his favourite song,” says the singer – and was pleased that Springs had found her own voice and style. “Pretty much everything you hear on Soul Eyes is all live,” she states. “It uses space with stripped-down instrumentation and minimal production… it really captures who I am.” Kandace Springs’ Soul Eyes is out now on Blue Note.