Shannon Hope

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Shannon Hope

“Music has the ability to take you to places that you can’t always access in everyday life. This is why we need artists like Durban-based Shannon Hope. Her music is emotive, evocative, and delivered with such honesty that you can’t help believing every single word. Hope is an exceptionally honest performer. She gets into those emotional places we often block out, with such ease and sincerity that you wonder if she doesn’t perhaps live there permanently. There were moments where she forgot the audience, and became lost in the music itself; the effect was simply mesmerising. Defining Hope’s genre is slippery; sometimes folk, sometimes pop, sometimes jazz it seems to crossover to something new. Hope calls it ‘Art Pop’, since her music is strongly lyric-based, a genre chosen to fit each song’s style rather than the other way around. Hope trained as a classical pianist so the music is technically tight. And while her lyrics are undoubtedly profound, Hope’s true strength is the emotional states she creates especially through her voice control. She is not afraid to reveal herself and often just uses vocals and keyboards to do so. Her music is raw, uncompromising and penetrating. From the melancholic “Blue Skies” to the playful and lovesick “Oh Boy”, her album covers a wide range of human experiences honestly and intelligently. Hope is brave and real, and her outstanding performance took me places I hadn’t been in years. Don’t miss it.” [Chantel Oosthuysen, Channel 24, Oct ‘09]

Shannon Hope is a South African born piano-based vocal artist who writes her own version of Art Pop that is intriguingly powerful, yet delicately moving in its artistry.

In only the first six months of launching her solo career, Shannon Hope had recorded and released her debut solo album entitled STILL, gained playlisting on radio stations across the country, and embarked on national promotional tours, performing on some of the country’s premier music platforms with some of its most revered artists including Prime Circle, John Ellis (Tree63), Josie Field, and Plush. Her extensive musical journey has seen her grace the esteemed stages of The Barnyard Theatre, Splashy Fen Festival, Woodstock SA, The White Mountain Folk Festival, Oppikoppi, Music at the Lake, as well as The Metro Theatre in Chicago. Her brief sojourns in America in the early days of her music career earned her the opportunity of recording a five track EP in 2004, with Chicago’s high profile producer, Bjorn Thorsrud (of Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan fame). It is her vast experience over the past years that now have her poised to become a respected force on the local scene, and she is fast gaining a reputation as one of the hardest-touring self-managed artists on the national circuit.

Her debut solo endeavour is classed within an alternative adult-contemporary genre, and is a mature and remarkably honest eleven track studio album, co-produced with Tim Rankin at his Cape Town studio, and recorded in a mere five days. Released on 1 April 2009, STILL delivers the thoughtfully personal and often heart-wrenching sincerity of an artist whose music forces you to feel, with a voice impossible to ignore.

“She has a powerful voice yet her tenderness with the keyboard is evocatively endearing, and her passionate story-telling invites you into her world. She has supreme voice/mic control, shaking her head, throwing her voice in and out of mic range. She knows exactly what she wants out of her voice, and she gets it.” [Gloria Rhodes, WhatsOnSA, Feb '10]

For more information, including press reviews, tour details and album samples, please visit the following online resources:
Website: http://www.shannonhope.co.za
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/shannonhopemusic
Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/shannonhopemusic
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/shannonhopemusic
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/shannonhope

Bookings: Contact Shannon Hope directly: shannonhope@rocketmail.com

Pics by Rogan Ward and Adrian Shields