“I’m pins and needles the next three weeks,” she says. (The five-piece girl group Rowland eventually put together is called June’s Diary.) Noelle was one of 60 singers called back for a second day of auditions, where she tried to break Rowland’s poker face-she sang solo, delivering a cover she’d prepared of Monica’s “Love All Over Me,” and in a randomly assigned group that worked up an arrangement of the Whitney Houston hit “I Will Always Love You.” There were 30 singers left standing at the end of the audition, Noelle among them, and she traveled back to Chicago to await final word from Rowland.
#NOELLE HEAR SERIES#
Noelle flew to Atlanta, where she learned that she was trying out for the BET reality series Chasing Destiny, a Making the Band-style competition with Rowland in the Sean Combs role. She was convinced only after hearing from multiple people affiliated with the project, who sent her information and forms for setting up an audition. “I thought it was a big scam, and I was like, whatever,” she says. The alleged producer complimented her sound and invited her to audition for a group that Destiny’s Child alum Kelly Rowland was assembling.
Though most have since been scrubbed from the internet, a few traces remain-including a dead link to a cover of Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” that Noelle posted on Del Rey’s Facebook page six years ago.ĭuring her junior year at NIU, Noelle got a message from someone claiming to be a producer who’d noticed her through one such cover. Noelle also demonstrated her range with vocal covers, which she shared on YouTube and Instagram.
She collaborated and performed with other members of NIU’s artistic community, including fellow Chicagoan Matt Muse, who’s since become a rapper and producer as well as a teaching artist with Young Chicago Authors. “I was young, so the things that I was talking about, none of it was super serious,” she says. But at the same time, she was also working on her own earliest songs. She further developed her acting and public speaking skills by competing in speech tournaments, and during her senior year she capped her student theater career by playing the lead role of Scheherazade in Homewood-Flossmoor High School’s production of The Arabian Nights.Īfter graduating from high school in 2013, Noelle studied corporate communications at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, hoping to parlay her speaking abilities into a career asset. “What stuck to me most was musical theater and choir.” She discovered a gift for performing, and refined her talents throughout elementary and high school-though she stresses that she’s had no formal vocal training aside from what she got through these extracurriculars.
“They literally put us in everything you can think of,” Noelle says. Her parents enrolled them in a smorgasbord of activities beginning at an early age-including choir, dance, and gymnastics. Noelle and her twin sister, Jamila, are the oldest of her family’s four children, all daughters. This person invented this sound.’ He was very big on making sure we know-’No, it started here.'” “Because you hear new music, and you’re like, ‘Oh, this is amazing. “It was very important for him to make sure that we knew who people were, and knew where stuff comes from,” Noelle says. Her resulting debut release, due May 31, is the sleekly produced EP Things You Can’t Say Out Loud, whose five soulful songs dissect relationships with conversational ease.īorn Johari Noelle Dodd, Noelle developed an early understanding of pop history while growing up in South Shore, thanks to her parents’ mammoth vinyl collection-a by-product of her father’s college DJ career. Noelle’s resumé includes acting, musical theater, and reality TV, but for the past 18 months, the 23-year-old Chicago native has focused less on bringing other people’s visions to life and more on creating a musical statement of her own. They’re complemented on the adjoining wall by an array of black-and-white photos and several photography backdrops, courtesy of her boyfriend and manager, James McCarter. Colorful paintings-slices of nature, simple human figures, abstract symbols-cover the wall between her kitchen and living room, most of them her own work.
Singer-songwriter Johari Noelle lives in a South Shore apartment that’s filled with art. Get your UnGala tickets: A museum takeover and art party on Novemcelebrating the Reader's 50ish anniversary Close
0 kommentar(er)
