Samantha James - Life and Career

Life and Career

The daughter of Melanie Lee Rose and granddaughter of musician David Rose, Samantha grew up with different types of music. During her teens, she became heavily involved in the underground dance scene in LA. Her influences include Pat Metheny, Sade, Tracey Thorn, Lady Miss Kier, Madonna, Esthero, Basia, and Roisin Murphy. At the age of 13, Samantha lost her mother to breast cancer after an 8-year long battle with the disease. After 8 years of working on her music she met Sebastian Arocha Morton who worked with artists such as Sting, Vikter Duplaix, and Fischerspooner.

When she met Sebastian she was determined to be different from other artists. After a while Samantha and Sebastian came up with a mix of soulful and electronic music and continued on that path.

Her friend Dave Curtin discussed with Samantha what would be a good label for Samantha's music and came up with Om Records. When they contacted the label and sent them a demo of her song "Rise", she was signed on to a single deal. After a while she was signed to do a full-length album. When she released her first single named "Rise" in 2006, it hit the #1 on the Billboard Club Chart making her debut album Rise end up in the "iTunes Top 100 Best Selling Dance Album." Shortly after releasing her debut album she toured around the world.

In 2009 Samantha announced on her Myspace that she was working on a new album named Subconscious. Samantha later stated that just before Rise was released, her father died and she took some time off before commencing writing new songs for the new album. On the new album she worked with producer (and old school friend) Shane Drasin since Sebastian was busy working on other projects. On June 22, 2010 James released her second album.

Samantha also released a song "Wings of Faith" dedicated to Japan, due to the tsunami in 2011.