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Artist
Five years after his two year stint being the keyboardist-organist-background singer to multi-platinum Grammy© winner Alicia Keys and a third botched recording deal, Rogiérs (pronounced Ro-ghe-ay) finally stands at the segue of ‘indie-artist with unyielding buzz’ and ‘certified breakthrough’ in R&B/Soul/Hip-Hop. A point that he always imagined but simultaneously disbelieves. “I’ve pursued this for so long that there’ve been moments when I forgot why I was doing it, and even more-that I actually could do it”, says the singer/songwriter/producer and label head. For Rogiérs, observing the landscape of popular music during the last few years has brought both incredible hopes yet despair-not just as an artist but for the entire field. There was hope that the promise of his “sexy-soul” voice, “expressive” playing, “deliberate” lyrical viewpoints and yes, good looks-could be a revitalizing ingredient which the industry and so many listeners seemed to long for. But it also brought despair that maybe these values had been overstated. “I haven’t been ‘excited’ about a new artist in years…I can think of three or four artists in the last five years that I’ve actually been ‘excited’ about; two out of four either never came out or sold less than 250,000 records,” says Rogiérs of the genre’s monotonous trend. It’s a trend that has sedated music lovers and yielded many acts to obscurity after months of costly marketing campaigns. It was these internal conflicts that conceived Rogiérs’ lead