Ella Mai: ‘I don’t know the last time an R&B artist was recognised at the Brits’

The artist behind 2018’s megahit Boo’d Up on Stevie Wonder, #MeToo and UK music’s glass ceiling

Ella Mai knows how to be a pop star, to such an extent that the south London-raised singer’s omnipresent R&B slinker Boo’d Up made her the first British artist since 1992 to top the US R&B chart, and has earned her two Grammy nominations this year. However, she also knows what it is like to be a fan. On tour, her merch stand offers lyric booklets, designed so that streaming-era audiences can relive the endless hours she spent as a teenager devouring the inlays that came with her favourite CDs. After the first night of Ella’s UK tour, she met some of those fans: mostly girls, mostly quite young. One of their mums pulled Ella to one side and said: “Thanks for making the time, she’s had a difficult year.”

Ella is still thinking of all this the next morning as she sits cross-legged on her hotel bed in her off-duty attire: blue beanie, orange hoodie, big smile. “It gives me a lot of satisfaction to know girls can look up to me the way I looked up to Lauryn Hill or Alicia Keys,” she says. “It’s a great feeling to know I can have that impact on someone.”

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from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2TAmQ1P