1. Nina Simone

Nina Simone is special to me because of her voice, the fact that she sings very low. When I listened to her voice for the first time, I asked my husband, ‘who is this man?’ and he said ‘no, it’s a woman!’. I told him: ‘no, it’s impossible, she’s got a voice like a man!’. That was my first impression of her voice and of her music. I like to sing very low when I’m in the studio so I felt very comfortable listening to Nina Simone, because this is the way that I wanted to write my music and sing. Also, the fact that she wrote a lot of protest songs. ‘Feeling Good’- you can interpret it as you want. When I listened to this song for the first time, it was my introduction to Western music. I was in Paris, and listening to this song was like freedom to me. Freedom, because when I left my family [in Mali], I ran away.