Childhood
Newton found her own voice as a child growing up in the town of Burshtyn, in the western part of Ukraine. At age five, she taught herself to sing by imitating famous Ukrainian and Russian vocalists, and begged her mother to invite her friends over so she could perform for them. "I didn't know if I wanted to be a singer, but I knew I loved performing," she says. At age nine, Newton began to enter regional vocal competitions to gain experience onstage. Then, when she was 11, a video of Michael Jackson performing his international hit "Earth Song" caught her attention. " I didn’t know who he was but I heard “Earth Song” and I decided: “oh my god, I want to do what he’s doing for the planet! I want to be where he is right now!” I’m in America This childhood dream came true."
While attending a performing arts school as a teenager (where she studied voice, piano, acting, dance, and pantomime), she continued to compete in local and international talent contests, taking first place at nearly all of them, which led to attention from music industry players, at the age of 16 she got signed with the record label Falyosa Family Factory.
Her first name, Mika, is a derivative from Mick Jagger's first name and Newton stands for a new tone.
Read more about this topic: Mika Newton
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
““O what unlucky streak
Twisting inside me, made me break the line?
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)