Idol Chatter & Voice Views

Tsola of The Voice Season 26

Season 26 kicks off Monday night with the coaching quartet of Gwen Stefani, Reba McEntire, Michael Buble and Snoop Dogg.

Here’s more about Tsola.

* She’s Tsola Akuya, now L.A. based, but born and raised in Silver Spring, Md., and she arrives at The Voice with an impressive performance resume.

* That said, during the early part of Tsola’s career, the performances came in the form of dance, not music.

* According to her website bio, Tsola began taking dance lessons — ballet, tap and jazz — at age 5 and eventually got into competive dance.

* After high school, she attended at Morgan State University as a fine art major for a semester, then the University of Maryland Baltimore County as a dance major before a dance agency lured her to L.A.

* That’s where the impressive resume begins. She became one of Pharrell Williams core dancers and also danced backup for Ciara, Kelly Rowland, Kanye West, Nicki Minaj and Pink, according to that web bio.

* She expanded her talent to choreography and assisted in choreographing H.E.R. 2021 BET perofrmance of “We Made It.”

* Her first singing job came in 2022, and it was an impressive one. She was one of eight background singers for Beyonce’s 2022 Oscar performance of “Be Alive.”

* In the meantime, she started recording her own music and released a debut EP called “Manu” in 2020.

* She followed that up with a second EP, “Winning Streak” in 2022. The title track and “Take About a Week” from that project are her most popular songs on Spotify to date.

* Tsola’s most recent release dropped in March, a single called “Seven Days in One.” “I literally cried playing this song for the first time on streaming platforms,” she wrote on Instagram. “Seven Days in One. My baby. My art. My story. Out now for all to hear after two years of not releasing music. Whew.”

* In her Spotify bio, Tsola says her originals are influenced by her love of electronic and neo-soul music and calls herself “a lyricist who harpts on the importance of rawness and vulnerability through sharing her testimony and life experiences.”

* Below, check out her song “Time Four(s),” which she calls one of her favorite creations to date. And, yep, she handled the choreography as well as the music.

Tsola on social media:
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