Tori Kelly
Tori Kelly
Victoria Loren "Tori" Kellyis an American singer, songwriter and record producer who slowly gained recognition after starting to post videos on YouTube at the age of 14. When she was 16, Kelly auditioned for the singing competition television series American Idol. After being eliminated from the show, Kelly began to work on her own music. In 2012, she independently released her first EP that she produced, wrote, and mixed herself, titled Handmade Songs By Tori Kelly. The following year, Scooter...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPop Singer
Date of Birth14 December 1992
CityWildomar, CA
CountryUnited States of America
I've never seen myself as a pop singer. I grew up listening to gospel, soul and rock. My approach to pop is that, when I was doing my album, I wanted to have raw, genuine lyrics, but wanted it to be easy to process.
I started writing music when I was 15 in my bedroom, and I'd post them on MySpace, and from there it shifted to doing covers on YouTube and building my Twitter.
I use this brand called Ouidad; they're great. Not Your Mother's is another one. Garnier Fructis. I use a bunch of stuff. Literally, I just throw a huge concoction of stuff in my hair after I get out of the shower, and then I diffuse it.
I think in 2016 I'm going to focus on performing a lot more and doing as many shows as I can. There's plans to tour more, and that's where my heart is - doing the live shows.
I think, for me, the goal was never really for my EPs to go mainstream. I think the intention of them was to create a little bit of buzz and to show my musicality because I wrote and produced the EPs myself. The goal was to experiment, with no rules.
People will come up to me at shows and tell me that a song touched them in a completely different way than I wrote it. That's fun. Fans translating it in their own way.
One of the most important things to me as a songwriter is to make music that's young and fresh but also soulful and real. I want people to feel like they know me once they listen to my songs.
My first competition, I guess, singing-wise, I was six years old, and there's a video of it, too. I'm just, like, stick straight. I'm not moving at all, and I'm just singing.
My faith is a huge part of my life. I don't force it into my music, but it's in my experiences, so it comes through. People pick up on what they want to pick up on, but any way strangers connect to a song that I wrote is awesome.
I remember growing up singing; even when I was just three years old, I was singing all the time in the house. My parents said I was singing before I could even talk properly.
I really like to rock it natural and let my hair go wild, but when I do style it, I slick all the hair over to one side with pins. It's either that or a messy bun.
I feel really comfortable when it's just me and a guitar. It's special and more vulnerable to strip it down. It can be scary, but it's also empowering.
'Funny' is really cool live. You break it down into an acoustic set, and sometimes I'll do that one unplugged and off the mic, depending on the venue.
Everything I write about either I have gone through or I know somebody has gone through, so it's very close to me, but sometimes it's about taking those feelings and exaggerating on them a little bit: being a bit more dramatic but still keeping them relatable.