Rhonda Nicole

Rhonda Nicole’s musical roots were firmly planted the day she arrived home from the hospital, and have borne sumptuous fruit ever since. A native of Dallas, TX, Rhonda began her lifelong love affair with music at birth, when her father—a musician and New Orleans jazz enthusiast--placed her in her crib and turned on the radio. The soothing melodies rocked her to sleep and served as the soundtrack to her early years. By contrast, Rhonda’s mother’s musical tastes included Motown greats such as Marvin Gaye and The Supremes, as well as Sly and the Family Stone, Aretha Franklin, and Donnie Hathaway. As soon as she could form words, Rhonda Nicole was singing any and everything she could mimic.A prolific songwriter since her pre-teens, Rhonda Nicole honed her craft as a lyricist by ingesting music by a multitude of artists, across a variety of genres. Her insatiable desire to hear, listen to, and learn as many different types of music as possible led her through an adolescence of teen pop, an undergraduate career of R&B and Hip Hop, and into a more refined and mature taste for rock, soul, and funk. Among her earliest and most obvious musical influences is Prince, whom Rhonda Nicole credits with “teaching me melody and harmony”. Her personal musical preferences, coupled with those inherited from her family, made for the eclectic mix of sounds and textures Rhonda Nicole favors, both as a singer and as a songwriter.While a theatre student at the famed Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (aka Arts Magnet), Rhonda was introduced to the works of John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Kravitz, and Sinead O’Connor. She continued to absorb new musical styles and expand her musical library, blasting Living Color and Jane’s Addiction on her Walkman cassette player and discovering what it is to be Black and conscious with the tunes of Arrested Development and Digable Planets as her soundtrack.A chance encounter with a local independent artist in the summer of 2002 gave Rhonda Nicole a much-needed creative boost. Although she had managed to score a few low-profile performance opportunities around Dallas, Rhonda was becoming increasingly discouraged by the seeming lack of activity on the Dallas music scene. After meeting Montrose, who had released his first self-produced CD, “Invisible Milk”, in 1998, Rhonda was certain she had finally teamed up with an artist whose vision and aspirations mirrored hers. Montrose proposed that Rhonda join him as his back-up singer for some acoustic dates around town, and agreed to assist her in compiling an EP of her own material. The two clicked right away, and immediately started rehearsing for a promotional tour to support “Inertia”, the follow-up to “Invisible Milk”.Rhonda Nicole is currently in the studio with Montrose recording songs for her EP entitled “Nuda Veritas”, due out in 2006 on Candlehouse Records. With a catalogue of over 1,000 original lyrics, Rhonda is aggressively pursuing a full-time music career, her sights set on becoming the next independent artist to make a global name for herself.