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:
“But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.”
—Louise Bogan (1897–1970)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“We hear a great deal of lamentation these days about writers having all taken themselves to the colleges and universities where they live decorously instead of going out and getting firsthand information about life. The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)