TORONTO — Five years ago, Melanie Fiona flew to Los Angeles, determined to make her music dreams come true.
The Toronto native had the right sound — great range and a distinctive voice, equally adept at expressing vulnerability and strength — and the right look.
All she needed to do was change everything.
“I met a lot of labels, executives and producers,” Fiona said.
“They’d say: ‘We love the way she looks, we love the way she sings.’ But I knew that the minute I worked with them or would have signed with them, they would have tried to change me into someone else completely different.
“That was something that I didn’t want to do.”
As it turns out, her stubbornness paid off. The past year has brought the 26-year-old the sort of chart success and industry respect she was willing to wait for, culminating in a nomination at Sunday’s 52nd Grammy Awards.
She’s up for best female R&B vocal performance for her heart-rending torch song, It Kills Me.
The Grammy nod was vindication.
“It’s like the best news I’ve ever received,” Fiona says, her voice cracking with enthusiasm.
“Oh my gosh, I instantly had flashbacks of just singing as a little girl into my hairbrush in front of the mirror. I went directly there. Could I even have imagined singing around my house and loving to sing would have me in this position now, one day?
“It’s just unbelievable.”
It certainly would’ve seemed that way at many points during the past few years, as time tested Fiona’s resolve.
Fiona was born Melanie Hallim, the daughter of Guyanese immigrants.
She had been active in the industry since 2002, when she was briefly involved with Toronto R&B girl group X-Quisite (she left before their first album was released, though she earned songwriting credits).
Her original southern sojourn came amid worries her career would atrophy if she stayed north of the border.
But she didn’t exactly move to L.A., either — in fact, Fiona says she hasn’t really lived anywhere the past five years.
How does she manage that?
“It entails crashing on people’s couches, hotels, living out of your suitcase,” she said.
“Just kind of being wherever you have to be, from recording to touring. You have to be visible, you have to be where there’s a demand for you. . . .
“I love travelling, I’ve seen and been to so many places I’ve dreamed of going, which was the best part.”
“And then of course I was tired of being all over the place and living from the suitcase. That’s hard on the clothes, and I hate travelling through airports, and lugging bags around the world, but you know, it’s a part of what I gotta do.”
Fiona forged ahead, dabbling in songwriting (she co-penned “Dem Haters” for Rihanna and wrote for Kardinal Offishall) while continuing to seek out her big break. She had opportunities, but nothing felt quite right.
“I recorded songs where I was like: ’I’m gonna do this to experiment, but this is not who I am, it’s not what I want to do,”’ she explained.
“It was singing about things in music that I didn’t really feel or relate to, just to conform with what other people were singing about. I don’t really sing about superficial things or money, cars, and clothes.
“I didn’t want people to focus on my appearance just so they would focus on my music. I didn’t want people to focus on my sexuality, or how sexy I can be and sell sex just so they could pay attention to my music.
“I didn’t want to have people dictate who I had to be.”
Ultimately, she didn’t have to.
In 2007, Fiona was discovered by Steve Rifkind — the hip-hop impresario associated with acts including Wu Tang Clan, Akon and Big Pun — and soon, her fortunes began to change. And it happened fast.
In the fall of 2008, Kanye West handpicked Fiona to open his European tour (“the best performing experience of my life,” she says of the tour). She also made friends with Jay-Z, whose Roc Nation group now manages Fiona, and Roots drummer Questlove, who issued a mixtape with her last summer.
In February, she released her first single, “Give it to Me Right,” a feisty empowerment anthem that doubles as an aggressive come-on. Far more confrontational than coy, the song married a brassy vocal performance from Fiona with the classic backbeat of the Zombies’ 1968 psychedelic single “Time of the Season.”
The song was written by Andrea Martin (no, not the SCTV actress but a songwriter and producer who has penned tunes for Toni Braxton, Nelly and Leona Lewis).
Martin said she was immediately taken by Fiona’s talent.
“Finally a voice that’s not only soulful, but ear-friendly,” Martin wrote in an email to The Canadian Press.
“Melanie is a definite addition to the world, she’s truly a light that brings life to every song she sings.”
Martin produced and co-wrote much of Fiona’s first album, “The Bridge,” which dropped in the summer.
Fiona recalls seeing the disc on a store shelf for the first time at an HMV in downtown Montreal.
“I totally freaked out,” she recalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I was jumping up and down. I was screaming. I was completely making a fool of myself in the store.
“But I’ve been working for this my whole life, so now’s not the time to be cool, you know what I mean?”
Indeed, it was Fiona’s work ethic that stood out to her collaborators.
“(Our sessions) ended up being really intense, for whatever reason,” said Darren Lewis, one-half of U.K. production team Future Cut, who handled three tracks on Fiona’s album.
“I don’t know how she did it. They had three or four studios set up, she’d come to us and write, go somewhere else and write. She was doing 20-hour days in that one week. She’d finish at 4, 5, 6 in the morning. It was incredible.
“And she was always the one there keeping the energy up. The two of us were suffering jet lag and kind of falling asleep on the mixing desk. She was still singing.”
Lewis wasn’t the only one who was impressed by Fiona. The New York Times said “The Bridge” was “one of this year’s best R&B albums, and also one of the year’s most promising debuts.”
But major chart success still eluded Fiona — until the Grammy nomination came in December.
Since then, “It Kills Me” — which Fiona calls gut-wrenching, “one of those records that kind of grabs you by the throat and makes you pay attention” — has rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard R&B/hip-hop chart in the United States.
Fiona says that she’s particularly pleased that the Grammy nomination is specifically for vocal performance, and not for songwriting or anything external to her.
Others, meanwhile, aren’t surprised.
“She’s just got a real, old-school, killer R&B voice,” Lewis said.
“There’s elements ... of her contemporaries, her idols, there’s a flavour of Mary J. Blige, there’s a hint of Aretha (Franklin), but I think actually what was good about (Fiona) was that she wasn’t just a carbon copy of people she loved. She took inspiration, which the best people do, but it’s about making it your own.”
And Fiona says she isn’t worried about winning on Grammy night.
“In my mind, it’s already a victory,” Fiona said.
“Being a part of history, of the 2010 Grammys, it’s such an amazing feeling. At this point, it’s just about being there and hearing my name called and seeing my face on the screen and being in the company of the amazing artists.
“It’s just an amazing feeling.”