Free Agent

Mavelle (nee Lindsay N. Gilbert)

By: Angie Romero

August 15, 2005

>NAME: Mavelle (née Lindsay N. Gilbert)
>AGE: 23
>HOMETOWN: Marlborough, Conn.
>GENRE: R&B
>FAVE ALBUM: 112, 112
>DREAM COLLABO: Dr. Dre

As a teen, the only thing that kept Mavelle out of the principal’s office was music. And when Mavelle’s gentle voice impressed the audience at a high school talent show in 1999, everything changed. True to her roots, she adopted her stage name and enrolled in the Hartford Conservatory. “This is not necessarily what a white girl would be singing,” says Mavelle, “but this is my music, too.” Her album, Off the Record, recalls early ’90s R&B while mixing in some modern sounds like crunk-and-B. Indeed, not many songbirds write, arrange, produce, and mix their own material during the day and then work the FedEx graveyard shift. “I had all these dreams back then,” she says, referring to her rocky adolescence. “Now I’m trying to make them happen.” And that certainly beats detention.