In an age when everything from fashion to furniture reeks of prefabrication, it is rare to find a genuine realness even in soul music. As the one genre of music that should send shivers through ones body while still managing to touch your heart, much of today's R&B feels as though more thought has gone into the choreography than the songs. And then, there is Shareefa.
Raised between Brick City (Newark) and East Orange, young Shareefa was a fan of legendary singers from the time she was a child. "I can remember taping the tributes to Smokey Robinson and Gladys Knight that were on the Soul Train Awards," Shareefa says. "I would be rewinding them all the time, practicing those routines until I knew them by heart. In the same way Patti LaBelle could make the hair stand-up on my arms with her voice, I wanted to be able to do the same thing."
Though Shareefa has cute childhood memories of dressing-up like 90s femmes TLC and Xscape, as well doing household chores with Mikki Howard and Donny Hathaway as her soundtrack, her teen years were a little bit rockier. Moving with her mother and two siblings to Charlotte, North Carolina when she was fifteen, Shareefa remembers, "I just started acting out and being disobedient."
"I needed to have a reality check. I woke up when I was seventeen."
Shareefa was then introduced to new jack swing innovator Teddy Riley. "At the time, Teddy was putting together a girl group, but he decided work with me as a soloist instead." Teddy also taught his protégé much about the craft of songwriting. "All the love, frustration, betrayal or any other emotions that I feel sooner or later finds its way into my songs."
Later, when she and Teddy decided to go their separate ways, Shareefa was blessed to get her demo heard by DTP co-CEO Jeff Dixon. "Jeff liked what he heard, but he still had me audition for him," she says, smiling. "Right on the sidewalk on 114th Street in Harlem, and I sang on the spot." Later that same day, after meeting Ludacris over at MTV studios, Shareefa was welcomed into the family.
