December 07, 2006 @ 11:50 am

Deemi

Celia San Miguel

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Twenty-seven years ago, just moments after her complicated birth, she stopped breathing. Her grandmother, a devout santera, called upon the protective African warrior spirit Tahu to revive the newborn. Named Tahu Aponte, the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter has since internalized that will to survive. Deemi grew up on her mother’s welfare checks, but at 7, she found a ticket out of her ’hood when a rendition of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” won her first place at a community talent show. Deemi was eventually admitted to Manhattan’s Talent Unlimited High School, where she studied music and sang in the concert chorus. “When I got there, they were singing classical music,” Deemi says with a chuckle. “Me and my friend looked at each other like, ‘What we done got ourselves into?’” Deemi’s singing aspirations were put on hold when, at 19, she gave birth to her son, Nathan, now 8. Her daughter, Felicity, 7, was born a year later. The pressures of being a poor, young mother were compounded by an abusive five-year relationship with her kids’ father, a round-the-way hustler known as Butta. In 2000, at 21, she finally left him (Butta was killed in Virginia in January 2004) and decided, she says, to take charge of her life. After a brief stint with the unsigned girl group DNA, she met Waynne “Bruce Waynne” Nugent, one-half of production crew Midi Mafia (50 Cent’s 2003 hit “21 Questions”), who signed her to their Atlantic Records–distributed imprint, Family Ties Entertainment. Already, her painfully honest piano-led ballad “Soundtrack of My Life,” from her forthcoming debut of the same title, is in heavy rotation at New York’s Hot 97 (WQHT-FM) and was featured in the compilation album Wendy Williams Brings the Heat Vol. 1 (Noo Trybe, 2005) as well as on buzz-heavy mixtapes like DJ Scope & DJ Biz’s R&B Overdrive and DJ Finesse & DJ Envy’s RNB Heat Wave 2k6 Part 2. The single finds Deemi revisiting her real-life wounds—from having no one to help babysit while she went to the studio to watching her baby daddy beat her mom with a metal dustpan. Through her intimate lyrics and hard-hitting vocals, Deemi recalls a young Mary J. Blige and seems to be striking a chord with wronged women everywhere. “You know how you have groups for domestic violence survivors?” Deemi asks. “It’s like I got a big ass support group all over the world.”
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