VV Brown

Ready for some "musical mashed potatoes?" As VV Brown describes her sound as an artist.

VV Brown, born Vanessa Brown in October of 1983, is a singer-songwriter, model and producer from the United Kingdom who describes her music as a mixture of punk, pop, indie and soul music blended together to create a sound inspired by the 1950s mixed with electronic music and video game sounds from Nintendo and Game Boy.

Brown released her debut album through Universal Records, Travelling Like the Light, in July 2009. Brown wrote all music and played all instruments herself. The songs on the album, including “Crying Blood” and “Bottles,” are based off a failed relationship Brown experienced.

The 26-year-old star was born in Northampton, England, as the eldest of six children. Brown quickly realized her talent at a musical arts school, which she attended on weekends. There she learned to develop her vocals and took classic and jazz piano lessons. An extremely dedicated student, Brown earned excellent grades and even began attending a local community college a year early. Although she was offered a place at five of U.K.’s top universities, Brown ultimately decided to choose her dreams of having a career in music and moved to the U.S. to pursue that goal in 2003. After gaining success, Brown was signed with EMI’s Capitol Records.

Brown has begun making appearances in the U.S. and her EP will be available in November. Recently the singer opened for Maroon 5, where she unveiled her single “Sleeping with the Enemy.” Teen Vogue featured VV in their magazine and she’s appeared in several other magazines, including the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. After being featured on several television shows in the U.K., Brown was nominated for BBC’s Sound of 2009 award, alongside Lady Gaga and most recently Brown was named an artist to watch by the Los Angeles Times and U.K. newspaper The Independent.

Music certainly isn’t Brown’s only talent; she’s also the author of a graphic novel, The City of Albacus, which was co-developed with her friend, David Allain, director of her music video for “Crying Blood.” The heroine of the novel just so happens to sport Brown’s signature flat-top hair style and have a need to break from the norm. The graphic novel is, according to Brown, “a chance to express a more political side, which sometimes I don’t have the chance to do when I’m making pop and mainstream music. It’s a chance to exercise this philosophical itch that I always had in me.”

Alongside Brown’s love for music and writing, comes her obsession with fashion. VV was signed by Next Model Management immediately after meeting with an agent during a flight. Brown snagged a shoot for Vogue magazine in 2009, which was a dream come true for the singer, saying, “I used to read my mum’s Vogue when I was little and I was fascinated.” Now she’s selling her very own fashions at her online boutique called VV Vintage!

Whether she’s singing, modeling, producing or writing, Brown isn’t showing any signs of stopping, “There's talkers and there’s doers,” the star told U.K.’s The Independent, “and it’s the doers that get put under the umbrella of entrepreneurs. For me, when I have a creative idea, I don’t just sit on it and talk about it all day. I do it. It’s not gonna be just this singer/songwriter VV Brown. There’s gonna be many different projects coming out of my head.”

You’ll get a chance to catch the driven starlet perform live at Q102’s Bosom Ball for Breast Cancer on Thursday, October 21!