German pop singer and multi-instrumentalist Sarah Connor grew up listening to soul music, mostly influenced by her grandfather who was born in New Orleans. A church chorus became her first experience in the gospel music field at a very young age. After participating in different musicals while still attending middle school, Sarah Connor started sending demos to different record labels. The opportunity to ac ...

Australian songwriter Sarah Blasko arrived in the U.S. in 2005 with a pedigree that couldn't be ignored: trailing a list of ARIA Award nominations in the categories of Best Album, Best Female Artist, Best Breakthrough Artist, and Best Pop Release, she also distinguished herself -- and perked up the ears of rock skeptics -- by being tagged somewhere along her cross-continental journey with the moniker "Girli ...

Polly Jean Harvey was born on October 9th, 1969 in Yeovil, England. While growing up in a small village consisting of 600 people, she felt isolated as the only young girl around town. As a result, she confesses to living most of her earlier years as a tomboy. This isolation propelled her to develop an interest in music. Much of her interest stemmed from her parents being avid collectors of many different mu ...

Patty Griffin was on March 16, 1964, in Old Town, Maine. She is the youngest of seven children and was born into a family of singers. Patty bought her first guitar at the age of 16, and it was around that same that she began to write her own songs. However, it was quite a while before she started to perform with her self-engineered band, Patty and the Executives, in 1980. It wasn’t until 1992 in Boston that ...

Neko Case was born on September 8, 1970, in Alexandria, Virginia. Her family is of Ukrainian descent -- their surname was changed from Shefschenko when the family immigrated to America in the 1940s. During her youth, Neko moved constantly, living all over North America, but spent the most time in Tacoma, Washington, which she considers her hometown. Neko certainly got out in the world early. She left home a ...

Melissa Morrison Higgins was born on August 19, 1983, in Melbourne, Australia. She is the youngest of three children of a doctor and a childcare center operator. Missy was a quiet child, but very mischievous, and a bit of a tomboy. "By the time my parents had me," she theorizes, "they couldn't be bothered to enforce the rules anymore." Ironically, once she was a teenager, Missy pleaded with her parents to s ...

Bassist Melissa Auf der Maur was briefly a member of two of the biggest alt-rock groups of the '90s, Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, before launching a solo career during the early 21st century. Born on March 17, 1972, in Montreal, Canada (her mother, Linda Gaboriau, was one of Montreal's first female rock radio DJs), Auf der Maur started her music career by playing bass in local outfits, including Tinker. ...

Born on May 25, 1984, Marion Elise Raven grew up in Lørenskog, Norway. Marion’s career as a singer-songwriter began with her love of singing as a child. At age 5, Marion began singing in the gospel choir at her church -- her first foray into singing. Throughout her childhood, she continued to participate in the performing arts, joining other choirs, taking ballet lessons and playing the piano. Around the ag ...

Leisha Hailey was born July 11, 1971, in Okinawa, Japan, but grew up in the sleepy town of Bellevue, Nebraska where she attended Bellevue West High School. It was there that she first got in touch with both her thespian and lesbian sides, and she came out of the closet at the age of 17. “I had fantastic boyfriends in high school who I loved very much, but I started tapping into my true sexuality in my later ...

Belgian-born pop singer/songwriter Lara Fabian began singing, dancing, and taking piano lessons at a very young age and began formal music lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels at age eight. During her ten years of study there, Fabian started writing and performing her own songs, which were inspired as much by her classical vocal and music theory training as they were by Barbra Streisand and Queen. ...