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Solange
Singer, songwriter

Solange, also known as Solange Knowles, got her start in the music business as the result of her status as the younger sister of R&B megastar Beyoncé Knowles. But with her 2008 release Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, Solange stepped out decisively from her more famous sister's shadow. She already knew that her personality was different from Beyoncé's, but with that album she adopted an innovative musical style that diverged from her sister's carefully honed urban pop blends.

The differences were due partly to chronology, Solange explained to Adrian Thrills of London's Daily Mail: "When Destiny's Child released their first record, I don't think I even noticed. I was still at school and I had my own life in Houston. People think there should be this great rivalry between us, but there's never been any competition. There's a big age gap and we are two very different characters." "Solange is a firecracker," mother Tina Knowles told Jeannine Amber of Essence. "Even as a child she walked to the beat of her own drum." Solange Piaget Knowles, almost five years younger than Beyoncé, was born on June 24, 1986, in Houston. When she was young she was classically trained in several forms of dance.

Solange's dance training provided her with an entry into the family entertainment empire: when she was 15 she joined the troupe of dancers backing the famed group Destiny's Child. The group's tours were international in scope, and Solange stated in her online biography that "it was then I developed a deep sense of culture, style, and artistic influences." With strong ambitions toward stardom herself, Solange began working on ideas for an album of her own. Her debut, Solo Star, appeared in 2003, before her seventeenth birthday.

The album took a critical drubbing; Sarah Rodman of the Boston Herald opined that it "lacks a distinctive personality" and that "a bevy of producers (Timbaland, the Neptunes) and guest artists (B2K, Lil' Romeo) practically make her a guest at her own party." Still, the album sold in the range of 112,000 copies, a respectable total, and it marked Solange as a musically adventurous figure. The singer herself, on her Web site, called Solo Star "a creative turning point for me; a melting pot of different genres and sounds including R&B, Reggae, Alternative, and even Country." Its first single, "Feeling You," drew on Puerto Rico's reggaeton style, then just beginning to make an impact in the mainland United States.

Rather than plunging into a second album immediately, Solange took time to develop her own voice musically. An important part of that process was emerging from the hothouse of the Knowles family empire and going through life experiences of her own, which soon came in abundance: Solange married Daniel Smith, a wide receiver with professional football's Carolina Panthers, in February of 2004, and the pair had a son, Daniel Julez J. Smith. For several years she was billed as Solange Knowles-Smith, and she lived with her husband and son in the Idaho mountains. The marriage lasted three years before ending in divorce—and leaving Solange with material for her songwriting. "I got married at 17, had a child at 18, and went through a divorce at 20, so I have a lot of mature stories to tell," she told Molly Fahner of Cosmopolitan. Those stories showed up on album tracks by Beyoncé, Kelly Rowland, Michelle Williams ("We Break the Dawn"), and others. After the divorce, Solange and her husband shared custody of their son and continued to cooperate in his upbringing.

Meanwhile, Solange concentrated on gaining wider exposure. She made several television series appearances between 2004 and 2006, including those on the CBS network's Ebony and Ivory and UPN's The Catch, as well as serving as a presenter on ABC's World Music Awards in 2005. Her biggest venture on screen was a major role in the 2004 comedy Johnson Family Vacation as the daughter of parents played by Cedric the Entertainer and Vanessa Williams. None of these opportunities came Solange's way because of her famous last name. "I had to audition for this role, I had to sing and audition for my record deal, you know, it hasn't been handed over to me," she pointed out to Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald.

Solange's sophomore album, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, drew on various influences as it took shape. Solange stated on her Web site that she "started to pull out my old records of Shuggie Otis, Marvin Gaye, and Otis Redding—artists that had messages and melodies that spoke to me. I experimented with the Soul of that type of music by adding subtle electronic influences I picked up along the way from traveling and spending so much time in London and France." The album mixed girl-group sounds of the kind that had made Destiny's Child famous with the ideas of electronics-oriented producers such as Cee-Lo, Q-Tip, and Raphael Saadiq. The end result, as exemplified in the leadoff single "Sandcastle Disco" (co-written with Cee-Lo) was a sound that combined the irresistible foot-tapping quality of classic Motown-label R&B with state-of-the-art production. Lighter pop numbers were balanced against harder-edged songs like the sex-and-marijuana romp "Champagnechroniknightcap," on which Solange appeared with rapper Lil' Wayne.

The album, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, appeared in August of 2008 on Music World, with distribution by the major Geffen label. Solange co-wrote all but one of the album's 14 tracks with a variety of other composers, but the track that meant most to her was written with Motown legend Lamont Dozier. The Hadley Street referred to in the album's title was the location of the Music World studio, purchased by Solange's father, Mathew Knowles, several years earlier. "It was the roots of the record and about the vision my father had. It didn't really matter that none of us could see it and all we saw was this shifty neighborhood, crack houses here, prostitutes there," Solange explained to Chitra Ramaswamy of Scotland on Sunday. Like its predecessor, the album billed its artist simply as Solange.

The album was praised by Andy Kellman of the All Music Guide as "fun, silly, slightly eccentric and, most importantly, fearless." Music buyers agreed, propelling the album into the top ten of the Billboard 200 pop sales chart, and to the number three spot on its Top R&B/Hip-Hop chart. With her first tour of the British Isles under her belt by early 2009, Solange, still only in her early twenties, was well on her way to a high-flying career—and she had reached that point mostly without invoking the name of Beyoncé Knowles.

Selected discography
Solo Star, Music World/Columbia, 2003.
Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, Music World/Geffen, 2008.

Sources
Books
Contemporary Theatre, Film, and Television, Vol. 78, Gale, 2008.


Periodicals
Boston Herald, February 23, 2003, p. 56; April 4, 2004, p. 55.
Cosmopolitan, October 2008, p. 138.
Daily Mail (London, England), August 8, 2008, p.55.
Daily Record (Glasgow, Scotland), April 9, 2009, p. 19.
Ebony, June 2003, p. 86.
Essence, October 2006, p. 96; August 2008, p. 59.
Guardian (London, England), August 15, 2008, p. 4.
Houston Chronicle, September 28, 2006, p. 1; December 2, 2008, p. 4.
Interview, March 2003, p. 100.
People, September 8, 2008, p. 55.
Scotland on Sunday (Edinburgh, Scotland), November 2, 2008, p. 17.
Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), September 8, 2008, p. 53.

Online
"Bio," Solange Official Web site, http://www.solangemusic.com (April 30, 2009).
"Solange Knowles," All Music Guide, http://www.allmusic.com (April 30, 2009).

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