SHI WISDOM with KJ, EMYND and YES YES Y’ALL DJs at the Annex Wreckroom (794 Bathurst Street), Friday March 16, 10 P.M. $10.
It was while driving my mom’s car through Brampton, listening to station presets I’d programmed in high school, that I first heard Shi Wisdom’s voice.
LoveSpeak, which got national airplay throughout the second half of 2011, is a playful meditation on romance. Shi’s sanguine soul takes the hard edge off crispy Dilla drums, borrowed from Q-Tip’s Let’s Ride, set up by beat duo Burd & Keyz. (Sadly, producer Anthony “Durty Keyz” James, just 23, died of a bacterial infection last year). LoveSpeak wasn’t just an optimistic tune for the rough fall ahead it hinted at sunny things for the local singer’s future.
A few days before Shi , 24, performs at the three-year-anniversary party for sweat purveyors Yes Yes Y’all (also featuring Philly club crusher, Emynd), we take a moment after both our work days to talk. “I’m a bank teller,” she says wearily. “My only goal is to be able to do music 24/7, but (the balance) involves late nights and sometimes not sleeping at all. I have a very regular life.”
Shi’s ‘regular life’ just happens to involve heavy rotation on FLOW 93.5 and G98.7, and collaborating with Raekwon protégé, rapper JD Era. Mount Olympus, the first of four songs Shi and JD (at SXSW this week) worked on, came out earlier this week. “He just hit me up on Facebook saying that he liked my voice and wanted to work on some songs,” Shi explains. “It was very normal and I thought he was talented so I said ‘sure.'”
Beyond guesting on rap songs, working in that world has another benefit for Shi who is, “obsessed with jazz sounds over hip hop beats.” Taking inspiration from like-minded singers like Lauryn Hill and Amy Winehouse, she’s mixed vocals over iconic rap samples like Camp Lo’s Luchini and The Isley Brother’s slow-funky Footsteps In The Dark. A new album, planned for April, will expand on that sound. Until then, she’s re-releasing the Shi Wisdom Mixtape on her website this weekend.
Despite a string of recent shows in the city performing might never get easier, she reasons. “I got the name Shi in grade 10. My friends would ask me to sing and I’d never want to because I was too shy,” she says. “People can sing randomly because they want to – not because they think there’s an audience.” Those friends, at St. Joan of Arc in Maple, also pushed her to perform in a school competition. Undaunted she tackled John Legend’s soaring vow, Ordinary People, simply because it was her favourite at the time. Not an easy song to master, but Shi’s nonplussed. “I like songs that are challenging to sing because then you have to work up to singing it well.”
Rigorous practice should come easy to the Royal Conservatory-trained pianist. “I started around 5 or 6 and played up until two years ago,” she says. “I did really well but I stopped because I got bored of classical music, it wasn’t fun anymore.”
But that intense training and a basement full of Prince, Jill Scott, Kim Burrell and Erykah Badu CDs – “my mom was a music head. We used to order them from Columbia House, like, 20 at a time. Just mad CDs for no reason!” – seems to have been the catalyst for writing her own songs. They’re tender real-life stories, which have roots in poems, and more often than not about love because “it’s easy to write about love when it’s all you can focus on.”
