Kinnie Starr

Known for weaving spoken poetry together with hip-hop and electronica within her spontaneous indie rock, Canadian singer, songwriter, and actress Kinnie Starr issued her first official solo album, Tidy, in 1996. Her initial feature-film role came in Down and Out with the Dolls in 2001. After the arrival of her third LP, Sun Again, in 2003, she received a Juno Award nomination for best new artist. She kept accepting acting parts in independent films through the 2010s, a span that also saw the 2018 release of Feed the Fire, her eighth studio album.

Alida Kinnie Starr grew up in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and completed a Women’s Studies degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario before settling in Vancouver to build a music career. She assembled her first band in 1992. Her earliest solo recordings appeared as the cassette demo Learning 2 Cook on Violent Inch Records in 1994, followed by the full-length Tidy on the same label two years later.

Island/Def Jam briefly signed her in 1997, yet she asked to exit the contract amid later acquisitions and mergers. The finished Def Jam project Mending remained unreleased. In the interim she joined the Lilith Fair tour. Returning to Violent Inch, she issued Tune-Up in 2000 and Sun Again in 2003. The next year brought her first Juno nomination, this time for New Artist of the Year.

After releasing one additional album on Violent Inch—2006’s Anything—she moved to Last Gang Records for A Different Day in 2010. That same year her production work helped Digging Roots earn the Aboriginal Album of the Year Juno for We Are, securing Starr her first Juno win. She also appeared in the crime film New Eden in 2010.

She next aligned with Toronto-based Aporia Records, which released Kiss It in 2013 and From Far Away in 2014. In 2016 she hosted and co-produced the documentary Play Your Gender, which addressed the scarcity of female producers in the music industry, then estimated at under five percent. Recovering from a brain injury sustained in a taxi-cab accident, she returned in 2018 with the social-media-inspired Feed the Fire.