Two Edmonton singers bounce into limelight

Edmonton pop/R&B star Kreesha Turner

EDMONTON - Call ’em the ’eeshas of Edmonton.

Kreesha Turner, a two-time Juno nominee, is now promoting her second EMI album, Tropic Electric, and will perform Thursday, Dec. 15 at Brixx Bar & Grill as part of Hip Hop For Hunger, an annual event which collects donations for the Edmonton Food Bank.

Quanteisha Benjamin, or Q-Benjamin as she recently renamed herself, signed a deal with Warner Music Canada — after she won a Juno last March.

Her first R&B/pop single for the label, Young Forever, was released in October, and she’s now living in Toronto, where she’s writing and recording more tunes.

Both vocalists are former winners of The Bounce 91.7 FM’s talent contest, which wrapped up its six-year run in 2010. As part of their prizes, Turner and Q-Benjamin each recorded a series of pop singles with Hipjoint Productions, a pair of Vancouver songwriters/producers.

Quanteisha Benjamin, known as Q-Benjamin

While the singers are grateful for the initial career boosts, they feel they’re only now exploring their true identities as musicians.

“My first album, Passion, was so pop,” says Turner, who was The Bounce’s first winner in 2005 and scored her first hit — and a record contract — with a Hipjoint track, Bounce With Me. “But with success comes control and that’s exactly what I had this time around.”

Q-Benjamin, who won in 2008, and recorded four Hipjoint singles —Cover Girls, Get Loose, Someday, D‘n’G — is a little more blunt about her experience.

“They wrote the songs and said, ‘Like it?’ and I’m not going to say no, so I just sang the songs and that was that,” she says. “Now, I’m coming out with a message.”

Here’s more about two of Canada’s brightest pop stars:

Kreesha Turner

Three years ago, she came across as any other sweet and bubbly young woman.

Her videos — for Bounce With Me and Don’t Call Me Baby — were as cute as her songs, nurturing an image of a fun and friendly girl who liked to hang with her gal pals, whether in a club or at home, nursing a broken heart over a pint of ice cream.

These days, the 26-year-old looks like a sexy Caribbean queen with no patience for giggly girls or immature boys. Her eyes are cool and coy as she surveys an army of male dancers in the video for Tropic Electric’s first single, Rock Paper Scissors. “The song is a representation of female power,” she says. “The woman is calling the shots.”

This image update is also a representation of Turner’s evolution as an artist over the four years between her poppy album debut 2008’s Passion and 2011’s elegant Tropic Electric. While her lyrics are still of the soft and tender variety — she’s not yet singing about S&M or killing men à la Rihanna — her second and latest batch of songs reflect Turner’s true tastes. Tropic Electric is a sensual mix of reggae and dancehall rhythms and sophisticated electronic beats.

“I had so much creative control on this album. I got to take back the reins and it’s conveyed in the sound change. Some people say, ‘Why the sound change?’ but to me, I’m just going back to what I had originally done before my first album. When I worked the urban scene, everything I did was a mixture of R&B and reggae.”

To achieve her sound, Turner worked with the co-writers and producers of her choice — including former Canadian pop star Sean Desman, and The Wizard, one of Jamaica’s most mysterious and successful producers. She took her time, refusing to rush to capitalize on the momentum of Passion, which spawned Don’t Call Me Baby, one of the most-played singles on Canadian radio in 2008, and earned her two Juno nominations (Pop Album of the Year, New Artist of the Year).

“Some days we’d show up and look at each other and say, ‘Do you feel like working today?’ ‘No! Let’s go to the beach.’ So that’s what we did,” Turner says of her studio stints in her mother’s homeland of Jamaica. “If it didn’t feel right, we didn’t want to stress the creative process. I think that’s why so much is lost in our world of music today. It’s not about the feeling or about being creative or creating music that feels good. So much of the industry is about formulas and gimmicks.”

By the end of the two-year recording process, Turner had enough songs to make four albums. Yet Tropic Electric only features 10 tracks — such as Rock Paper Scissors, a delicious dancehall number produced by The Wizard, and Love Again, a friendly pep talk to an ex-boyfriend, with a dusting of beats produced by Desman. “I guess as an artist, I’m pretty much a perfectionist,” Turner says.

Then there’s I Could Stay, a breezy, Janet Jackson-esque love ballad, inspired by her husband and future road manager, Quinton Ward, whom she married last December. (She now splits her time between their homes in Phoenix and Edmonton.) In an attempt to exercise her girl power, Turner didn’t want Ward to know the song was about him, but her songwriting partner, Erika Nuri, let it slip.

“I was like, ‘No! You’re not supposed to tell him! Now he’s walking around, with his head up high’,” Turner laughs. “But it was actually his favourite song on the album before he knew it was about him. He told me: ‘The first time I heard it, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I hope she writes a song about me like that one day.’ Eight months later, he finds out I did.”

Q-Benjamin

Unlike a lot of talent contest winners, Quanteisha Benjamin didn’t come out of the womb with a microphone or a fanatical quest for stardom. Her family didn’t even know she could sing until Q-Benjamin was 14, when her mom bought a karaoke machine. Two years later, she started taking choral music classes, then auditioned for The Bounce’s talent contest — and won. “I never wanted people to know because I didn’t want to hear ‘You can’t do it’ or ‘It’s not possible,’” says the 19-year-old graduate of Ross Sheppard High School.

Q-Benjamin is full of surprises. As an unsigned artist, she shocked Canada’s music industry when her fifth single, Stars, won R&B/Soul Recording of the Year at (the untelevised portion of) this year’s Junos. Even she was floored.

“People ask me what I remember the most about that night and I tell them: ‘The taste of mashed potatoes’,” she smiles. “Because they were in my mouth as I was running to the stage. I had to swallow, swallow, swallow.

“Other people seem to remember the speech I made at the Junos because the last thing I said was: ‘For the record, I’m still looking for a manager and a label. So if you’re interested, call me’.”

After a flood of calls, Q-Benjamin signed with Warner Music Canada. (One of the label’s vice presidents approached Q-Benjamin at a gathering before the awards.) She then moved to Toronto and — surprise, surprise — decided to change her stage name from Quanteisha to Q-Benjamin.

“It’s fancier and I like to be different. I’m very inspired by hip-hop and rappers always have really dope names. Quanteisha is just boring to me whereas Q-Benjamin is so cool. I love my last name and there’s that song, too — It’s All About the Benjamins” — which refers to the dude on the $100 U.S. bill. (Psst ... Benjamin Franklin.)

While many independent musicians worry about giving up creative control if they sign to a major label, Q-Benjamin feels she has more freedom as a Warner artist than she did on her own. Yes, she’s collaborating with several co-writers and producers, but she feels like her musical vision is front and centre: “I like to keep positive stuff out of there but I want an artistic edge to it.”

Her first Warner single, Young Forever, is a perfect example of this mix. It’s got the positive stuff or message — enjoy yourself, don’t grow up too fast — and the artistic edge, a blend of R&B, pop and hip-hop.

“You know how rappers say ‘I’ve got money, I’ve got clothes,’ that’s what I wanted to go for to catch people’s attention because you don’t really get that from a lot of females in music,” she says. “Especially in pop. So I went with: ‘I wanna be street street legal in a droptop Beemer.’ The whole song is a metaphor for the road of life.”

Armed with such swagger, you know Q-Benjamin has lofty goals, or destinations, in mind.

“I need to put Edmonton on the map. Even in Toronto, people assume I’m from Toronto. I think it’s important that people know that talent comes from everywhere in Canada.”