Janelle Monáe - The Audition (2003)

Janelle Monáe Robinson was born on 01 December 1985 in Kansas City, and was raised in Quindaro, a working-class community of Kansas City. She was raised Baptist and learned to sing at a local church, and she dreamed of being a singer and a performer from a very young age, citing the fictional character of Dorothy Gale from The Wizard of Oz as a musical influence. As a teenager she was enrolled in the Coterie Theater's Young Playwrights' Round Table, which began writing musicals, one of which was inspired by the 1979 Stevie Wonder album 'Journey Through "The Secret Life of Plants"', and which was completed when Monáe was only around the age of 12. After high school she moved to New York City to study musical theatre at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, but after a year and a half she dropped out and relocated to Atlanta, enrolling in Perimeter College at Georgia State University. She began writing her own music and performing around the campus, and in 2003 she self-released a demo album titled 'The Audition', which she sold out of the trunk of a Mitsubishi Galant. During this period she worked at an Office Depot, but was fired for answering a fan's e-mail using a company computer, an incident that inspired the song 'Lettin' Go', which in turn attracted the attention of Big Boi of OutKast. In 2006 she appeared on the tracks 'Call The Law' and 'In Your Dreams' from OutKast's 2006 album 'Idlewild', and when Big Boi told his friend Sean "Puffy" Combs about her, Combs visited her MySpace page, and was so impressed that he signed her to his Bad Boy Records label. The label's chief role was to facilitate her exposure on a broader scale rather than developing the artist and music, taking its time to build her profile organically and allowing the music to grow. 

In 2007, Monáe released her first solo work, 'Metropolis', which was originally conceived as a concept album in four parts, or "suites", which were to be released through her website and mp3 download sites. After the release of the first part of the series, 'Metropolis: Suite I (The Chase)' in mid-2007, these plans were altered, and Bad Boy Records gave an official and physical release to the first suite in August 2008, which was retitled 'Metropolis: The Chase Suite (Special Edition)' and included two new tracks. The EP was critically acclaimed, garnering her a Grammy nomination for Best Urban/Alternative Performance for the single 'Many Moons', which then led to festival appearances, and touring as opening act for band No Doubt on their summer 2009 tour. In 2010 she released her first full-length studio album, 'The ArchAndroid', a concept album and sequel to her first EP, following this in 2013 with her second concept album 'The Electric Lady', which debuted at number five on the Billboard 200, and served as the fourth and fifth instalments of the seven-part 'Metropolis' series. Her third studio concept album, 'Dirty Computer', was released in 2018 to widespread critical acclaim, and it was chosen as the best album of the year by several publications. She has also branched out into acting, featuring in both 'Moonlight' and 'Hidden Figures' in 2016, and in April 2022, Harper Voyager published her first book, 'The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer', which explores how different threads of liberation — queerness, race, gender plurality, and love — become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in a totalitarian landscape. Monáe has always been very focussed on her career, and this was evident from the very beginning, when she pressed up 500 copies of her demo album and hawked them from the back of her car, and so for anyone who wants to hear what the fledgling singer sounded like back in 2003 on those thirteen mostly self-penned songs and one instrumental, then here is 'The Audition' - a perfectly named album if ever there was one. 

Track listing

01 Thoughts (Intro)
02 Lettin' Go
03 Party Girl
04 Metropolis
05 Cindi
06 It's Not Fair
07 Time Will Reveal
08 My Favorite Nothing
09 Warm Up (Cloud 9 interlude)
10 Cloud 9
11 Star
12 I Won't Let Go
13 You
14 You Are My Everything