Patrice Pike

Patrice Pike served as lead vocalist of Sister 7 when Clive Davis, after hearing a demo of their Wrestling Over Tiny Matters album, began pursuing her in 2000 for his Arista roster. Just three months later Davis was removed from the label, so the completed project remained unreleased and the group disbanded soon afterward. Pike then launched Black Box Rebellion and adopted the hyphenated surname Pike-Zain to commemorate her previous band; the word “Zain” means “seven” in Aramaic. She formed the new outfit with her longtime collaborator, guitarist Wayne Sutton, and together they created Zainwayne Records to avoid another label catastrophe like the one they had experienced at Arista.

Her first instrument, a ukulele, arrived while she was still a toddler. A stepfather who performed guitar in Dallas clubs meant she was already absorbing live music in hazy barrooms by age three. When finances tightened the family abandoned the city for rural surroundings, prompting Pike to threaten running away; her mother responded by arranging an audition at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas. She enrolled at fifteen and counted Erykah Badu and Roy Hargrove among her classmates, later receiving counsel from Wynton Marsalis during one of his school visits.

Pike first encountered Sutton at a Dallas street festival while both were still teenagers. After Sutton moved to Austin and then returned to Plano, the pair began writing songs together. In the early ’90s they assembled the band Little Sister, relocated to Austin, took jobs at the Black Cat, and served as openers for Soul Hat. Following two albums and a series of legal warnings from other similarly named acts across the country, the group renamed itself Sister 7.

Once Sister 7 dissolved, Pike pursued solo work and issued her debut album, Fencing Under Fire, in 2000. She also entered the second season of producer Mark Burnett’s reality series Rock Star: Supernova, vying to front a supergroup that included drummer Tommy Lee. Before the program aired she had already tracked her fourth solo album, Unraveling, which appeared after the show concluded in 2006.