Monthly Archives: January 2024

TANSU has been training to become a diva her whole life.

The longtime Harlem resident, who is of Turkish-Irish descent, has an irrepressible spirit, a renegade sense of fun, and a totally knockout voice, honed through years of training with the masters and absorbing the work of her favorite soul divas.

Born in New Jersey and raised in London and Connecticut, TANSU always felt connected to soul music. Specifically, some of her core memories involve Whitney Houston: as a toddler she refused to eat her dinner unless “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” was playing. And she remembers waking up every morning, playing with her Barbie dolls, and listening to the Waiting To Exhale soundtrack on repeat, entranced by The Voice emanating from her speakers. Throughout TANSU’s youth, the pop stars of the day were like gods: she worshiped at the altar of Mariah and the Spice Girls, artists who combined vocal chops and platinum-plated charisma with a gonzo attitude and fierce commitment to their art. 

It was artists like these who inspired TANSU to throw herself into performance arts at high school. But the limited training she was able to receive – only Broadway or classical, hardly the kind of high-glitz, forward-thinking music TANSU loved – felt lacking. When she enrolled in the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, she was finally able to study pop music properly, as well as the kind of technique that would allow her to try her hand at any style she wanted – setting the stage for an artistry defined by effortless genre bending and a deft musical ear.

After college, TANSU moved to New York and began working in fashion, a field that she describes as “another performing art,” much like music. TANSU loves fashion – and still has a lot of connections in that world, a must for any future pop star – but she says that “fashion can eat you alive.” She speaks from experience: working for one of the major fashion houses early in her career, she began spending upwards of 15 hours a day chained to her desk, rarely seeing family and friends and burning herself out trying to be an A+ worker. Then Whitney died. The passing of her prime inspiration, someone who had provided solace and connection to her for her entire life, was a wake-up call for TANSU. She realized that Whitney singing for the world was a great, selfless gift, and given that she too had a remarkable voice, it would be selfish if she didn’t try to do the same. From then on, fashion took a backseat to her true passion: music.