After earning a degree in graphic design from a university in Long Beach, soul singer Vonyse (pronounced VON-eese) embarked on a journey in the real world as a career woman working for several advertising agencies and start-up companies during the dot-com boom.
"The last company I was at, I was driving home from work, part of the same routine I'd had, and I just decided that this wasn't my calling - it was meant to be a backup plan," she said on her decision to become a full-time musician.
The theme of her new album, "When Sleeping Giants Wake," serves as a representational snapshot of Vonyse's spiritual and intellectual awakening she experienced while working a 9-to-5 job. The songs address issues as diverse as her music tastes - Meshell N'degeocello, Peter Gabriel, John Mayer's early independent work, Fiona Apple, Rolling Stones, the Staple Singers and the Doobie Brothers.
"I feel like my songs symbolize our need to stop and think about what we are doing - if it's right, what works and what we are creating at the end of the day, and what that will yield," said Vonyse.
"I wanted to acknowledge those countries/continents/a group of people that have a deep-rooted history," she added about her mentions of places and people with rich and long histories like Asia, Africa and Latin America and Native Americans in the song "Dr. Frankenstein." "I wanted to look at these places and what their contribution was originally, and when do we love them instead of having the generations of offspring that come from those groups and places feel like a minority. They are just as part of the majority as anyone."
Vonyse, disillusioned with her corporate career, decided to follow her passion within the musical world and recently recorded, produced and designed the album cover art for "When Sleeping Giants Wake."
"I was on a couple of advertising campaigns and we were told to use any means possible to stimulate the customer to buy things that we don't need," stated Vonyse on her epiphany. "I think one of the last major campaigns I was on with an advertising agency was for liquid packets that were supposed to change your can of soda into a soda fountain drink, but it was just pure sugar. None of us would drink it ourselves, but we were supposed to sell this to mothers and their kids, and it was just like, wow!"
Vonyse's matters of the heart range from her early sexual experiences as a victim of molestation and her own spiritual awakening to the effect of mainstream media and corporate corruption to good old-fashioned love that not only reflects her professional life but also her personal life.
"I had a lot of experiences good and bad - molestation as a child early on exposes you to sex too soon and you tend to associate the feeling of sex with love and it's not always that," said Vonyse. "I think young girls have to realize how to not identify the act as a way to fill up their spirits but to understand that it's a choice, a gift. It was gradual for me and it was actually falling in love with someone who didn't make sex a priority. That was what distinguished my love for them."
Vonyse spent her youth in Indianapolis, but sensing her young daughter's discomfort in an Indiana lifestyle, her mother posed the idea of relocating to Northern California when Vonyse was a freshman in high school. She finished high school as a member of an award-winning gospel choir in Pleasanton. Vonyse's mother later moved back to Indiana when she enrolled in college.
"This album is about a fresh start and the idea to waking up to life. I don't want to say there is a particular age group, but I think there is a generation right now that I feel like my mom and some of the people of her generation were handing off the baton to," said Vonyse.
Vonyse created the new album independently and wrote the song using an acoustic guitar, her laptop and a digital 16-track recorder in the comfort of her own living room.
"I feel like a lot of those movements in the 1970s they kind of started to fizzle out, and the last generation were handing it off to us, but it doesn't seem like we picked up from where they left off," added Vonyse about the idea of waking up a metaphorical sleeping giant. "It took me realizing that I was on automatic pilot - going to work as a way to get the car and the house - and I thought what am I doing and what is this life all about?"
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