Nikki Jean

It’s hard to place Nikki Jean in time or space. A born drifter, through decades of musical influences, the half dozen states she’s called home, and the disparate events that have created an enigma of an artist. While those in her cohort dug through crates of music from bygone eras for their sample value, she was reading their sheet music like novels, while writing a novel of her own and it reads like a love song to hip hop. The early signs were all there. The girl from St. Paul who cried when Irving Berlin died as a child and snuck into De La Soul concerts in junior high would become the artist who worked out of the Roots studio and went on to write songs with Bob Dylan and Burt Bacharach.