and the grammy goes to…Sam
She hadn’t been in the top twenty song charts in five years. Some people thought she was done. At the young age of fifteen years old, Sam had won over ten Grammys. Each one of her songs won album of the year since she was twelve. No one had seen such a musical genius so original and so genre defining since the likes of Prince or Janet Jackson. She was her own thing. Her own sound. She wasn’t even an amazing singer!
If you paired her next to a wedding singer, she was ok. It was her tone. It was her style of singing. It was how she spoke and the way she crafted her songs. Her instrumentation was so original and so simple. It tore the industry apart. She didn’t have all the bells and whistles of a studio or even equipment.
Her first song featured only her voice, her hands, and her chest. It was so original that it became the most streamed song of all time The song was called, A Wishing Rock. It was a light in a sea of copy cats. Many thought she was a genuine one hit wonder. The following year she dropped her full length album titled, Hands and Feet. She played with her hands and drummed with her feet. It was so naked and bare that it stuck out like a sore thumb. Every other popular song was overly produced, overly mixed, overly sung. Her whole album felt like a rebirth of music making. It shattered all stereotypes, and all traditions. The front cover of the album was a simple picture of her looking at her reflection in the water. Ankle deep. Her head lifted to the rain.
Sam was an instant icon and role model to many new artists. Some had switched to more of an acoustic sound after hearing her album. Others quit creating music altogether. A quote form Shareebah, R&B music icon, "I will retire. My music was ok. I am just now seeing this. I am rethinking everything I create from now on. Is it pure? Or is it a lie?". She did retire. The most decorated female singer of her era. She put up her microphone and quit. Many other artist followed her example. Many called it the great musical exit of the 21st century. Sam didn't want others to stop creating just because her music was so different. She wanted to inspire rather than deter or adhere others from creating. Eight albums later she was now twenty on the heels of her twenty-first birthday. She left the musical scene when she was a teenager, and hadn’t been seen in years.
She was living comfortably abroad in the city of Kyoto, Japan with her Mother Lu and Grandfather Ping. She had written a new song almost everyday since disappearing five years ago.
