User:Launchballer/Raphaella

Raphaella Sedigheh Mazaheri-Asadi is a singer from Whetstone. She featured on MK and Sonny Fodera's "One Night" and MK's "Lies", which charted at numbers 51 and 82 on the UK singles chart. She also co-wrote Cher Lloyd's "Lost" and Petit Biscuit and JP Cooper's "We Were Young" and has vocal production credits for the Little Mix songs "Kiss My (Uh-Oh)", "Break Up Song", "Heartbreak Anthem", and "Confetti".

Life and career
Raphaella Sedigheh Mazaheri-Asadi was born in Whetstone, an obscure suburb of North London. Her father was a Persian rug specialist who gave each of his three children a carpet for their birthdays and her mother was half-Scottish. Growing up, her grandfather would play works by Berlioz, Schubert, Ella Fitzgerald, and Motown and her parents were into soul music, Motown, reggae, and traditional Persian music. She attended Holly Park Primary School in Friern Barnet, Palmers Green High School in Winchmore Hill, North London Collegiate School in Edgware, Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance in London, and completed her dissertation on political protest music.

Her first two EPs, Idiot and Start a Fire, were released in 2013 and 2014, and were funded by bartering some of her birthday carpets, including one to Blair MacKichan's wife.

Artistry
In an interview with Times series in April 2013, she stated that she was influenced by Nina Simone, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, Bon Iver, M83, Emeli Sandé, and Bruno Mars and inspired by real life experiences, photography, film, literature, and poetry, especially Persian poets such as Hafez, Rumi, and Ferdowsi. She stated in a May 2020 interview with Songfacts that her usual practice was to give away songs if doing so did not "physically hurt [her] heart"; one track dispensed in this manner, "Castles" by Ivy Quainoo, had already been recorded prior to her giving it away.

EPs

 * Idiot (2013)
 * Start a Fire (2014)