La Petite Toy

It’s a brand new day for La Petite Toy, formerly known as Toi. She's entered a different space since topping the charts in 1996 with the Crucial Conflict’s single, “Ride the Rodeo,” and if you have her tell it, she's a grown woman now. Upon a single listen of her long-awaited follow-up debut, “Baby Bye,” it's evident that she still got that thing. After going through her share of hardship and coming out stronger, smarter, here she stands, ready to sing her songs. It's been a minute since we've heard her voice…actually more like three years. Back in summer '02, La Petite Toy ruled the French airways, blessing listeners with the Madizm-produced hit single, “Are You Ready”. The song banged from the hair salons to the clubs and reached the 1 spot on the Radio Airplay chart. Before that, she reached the Gold record status in France with “United We Stand” and also appeared on various R&B compilations. After being tangled in a web of record company politics, she soon found herself without a label to call home….yet those songs never went away, still hasn’t.
When asked to describe her feelings in the aftermath of being without a label, La Petite Toy is open and honest about the struggles she endured. “After having such success with my first appearances, it was really devastating to be cheated on and pushed out of industry,” she recalls. “I trusted some people, I trusted the words that was coming out of their mouth, but I should not have. I even wonder if they really had a plan to release anything from me. I just was being used as the feminine touch and never was respected as a solo artist.” Having moved from Chicago nearly a decade prior, she returned to her Illinois roots to regroup and regain her footing, traveling back and forth between France and United States. “There were days that I barely had the energy to do anything,” she notes. “Hopefully, I had a good support system around me and the birth of my daughter brung the sunshine back into my life.”
Not one to rest on her laurels for long, she packed her belongings and headed to Los Angeles to get a taste of the current movie industry by late 2007 and arrived amid the WGA strike. She decided to continue recording new materials and accumulated enough songs to create a buzz again. Disappointed by the state of the game, she decided to go digital. Much has changed in the music game since La Petite Toy left us, so where does she hope to fit in, today? “There is a lot of talented artists out there. I am only a bit sad to see that women are still being used as object and barely can make it happen when they do not talk about sex issues. But that is not a reason to dig a hole and hide from the audience. I like to have fun, so I hope my music can be a reflection of my moods as much as possible.”