Kinnie Starr: Born to Shine

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Kinnie Starr, started in the music business doing songs that were rap and pop influenced. She started working on her folksy side when she first heard Joanna Newson’s album called ‘Milk-Eyed Mender’ which came out in 1994. “When I first heard this album, she made me realize that a song can be as beautiful with only one instrument, in this case one voice. I needed to remember that, she made me be more focused and a better artist.”

Kinnie is known be versatile and performs her art in three languages, Spanish, French and English. When asked which one she preferred best when it came to rap, she answered that these days she tends to rap in English more, “when I used to rap in three languages I’d loose my audience a lot, so I started to concentrate on one language at a time although it is easier for me to free style in Spanish and French.”

Kinnie is well known for her work with youth community and co-founded Vancouver’s Aboriginal Music Lab with Sal Fererras and Vancouver Community College in 2006. “The first thing I tell them is to get out there and do it. If you just dream about being a rock star, it will always be only a dream, get out there, work hard at it and then only then, will it come to you. Being an artist isn’t easy, you have to work at it EVERYDAY. If you’re talented it’s not going to get you anywhere, hard work is what’s going to get you somewhere, that’s the advice I give them.”

As mentioned earlier, Kinnie recently published a book entitled “How I Learned to Run”. It’s a collection of illustrations and poetry that she has been gathering over the past five years, “this is like a memoir, it starts at the lake, where my grandfather is from, on the native side of my family, the areas around Toronto and it goes through my life. Basically a lot of babies were born in my family and I felt like I needed to document something of mine in print rather then in music to leave a mark and leave something behind for the next generations.”

When the subject of leaving something for future generations came, I asked Kinnie what she would want her legacy to be, “I think I have already made pretty good marks on the planet, like I’d be happy if I died tomorrow. For real though I don’t think I’ve written my best song yet, and things like that. I have professional goals that I still would love to reach but I mean the people that I’ve met and the relationships that I have with my parents, my husband, my cousins, brothers and friends they are rich. I feel like I’ve been a part of a social movement and I’ve been at the front of it, a social movement led by music that has created and shown some lights on the diversity of the indigenous people in Canada. For that I can’t tell you how proud I feel to have taken this step, because it’s helped me to come out of the closet essentially. I’m a person who is a Canadian girl of mixed heritage and also my sexuality, like I’m very open about it and I’m quite a strong willed and eccentric person and I’m happy to have made what little impact I’ve made because I think it helped. For me it’s important that people see me as Canadian. I am who I am, I don’t have blond hair and blue eyes, I’m part native yeah, but I’m Canadian.”

For more information about Kinnie Starr you can visit the following websites:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Kinnie-Starr
http://www.myspace.com/kinniestarr

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