Janelle Monae is the 26-year-old baby-faced, wonder-voiced alternative R&B and soul musician hailing from Kansas City, Kansas.
Monae began singing young in theatrical performances in church and local productions. She developed her writing skills by joining the Kansas City’s Coterie Theater Young Playwright’s Round Table and publishing multiple full-length plays and musicals, including one inspired by Stevie Wonder’s “The Secret Life of Plants” at age 12.
Soon after her high school graduation, she ventured to New York to attend the American Musical and Dramatic Academy with the intention of excelling in musical theater. She later ended up in Atlanta, Ga., where she temporarily worked at an Office Depot to fund her first self-recorded project entitled “Janelle Monae: The Audition.” There she met future creative partners and The Wondaland Arts Society co-founders, Chuck Lightning and Nate Wonder. The three of them would create and produce sounds that promoted innovatively experimental music.
This type of ambition got Monae noticed after a remarkable rendition of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” was acknowledged by critically acclaimed rapper and producer Big Boi of Outkast. Big Boi chose to feature her on a few of his mixtape and Outkast’s “Idlewild” LP in 2006. Given this motivation, Monae would produce her next project, “The Metropolis Suite I (The Chase),” with her Wondaland Arts Society creative partners in 2007, which caught the attention of Sean “P.