Solange

Solange Knowles, a Houston native born in 1986 into a musical family, spent her teens as a backup dancer for Destiny's Child, the group that featured her older sister Beyoncé, before signing to her father Mathew Knowles's label, Music World Entertainment. She was 16 when her first album, Solo Star, came out in 2002, and she found time for film roles too.

The real story starts with Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams in 2008, a love letter to the Motown girl groups that reached No. 9 on the Billboard 200. The True EP, released in 2012 on Terrible Records and her own Saint Records imprint, swapped Motown for glossy '80s pop and R&B. Then came A Seat at the Table in 2016, a quiet, slow-burning, gorgeously unhurried soul record that topped the US album chart and won a pile of acclaim. Its lead single, "Cranes in the Sky", all floating keys and gentle ache, took the Grammy for Best R&B Performance.

When I Get Home followed in 2019 to more praise, and her work has spilled out of the record shop and into the art world, from the Elbphilharmonie to the Venice Biennale and the Guggenheim. In 2022 she became the first African American, and only the third woman, to compose a score for the New York City Ballet.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.