NADIA ALI
It is sometimes hard to believe that the Grammy nomination for Nadia Ali's "Fantasy" (Morgan Page Remix) is only one of many milestones marking her musical achievements. Nadia's career exploded as a member of "iiO" with the massive 2001 hit, "Rapture". Quickly leaping to #2 on the UK Singles chart, "Rapture" would propel Nadia into the spotlight and serve as a shadow of things to come. Now armed with a solid decade of commercial success and an almost feverish evolution of artistic expansion… Something tells us that Nadia Ali is just warming up. To date, Nadia's career as singer/songwriter has attracted a massive international following resulting from a masterful exploitation of captivating vocals and dance music. Nadia has attributed this unmistakable style to the overarching influence of her eastern ancestry, as well as the diverse cultural climate of her upbringing in Queens, New York.
Beginning in 2001, Nadia's lush vocal style would take the world by storm, becoming a globally recognized trademark in the dance music industry, and keeping her in nonstop demand by the hottest innovative DJ's worldwide. Recent and notable collaborations include: Schiller, Sultan & Ned Shepard, Chris Reece, Tocadisco, Serge Devant and Starkillers. In the mean time, Nadia's recent team up with Armin Van Buuren, (ranked the # 1 DJ in the world for 4 consecutive years), has been generating a white-hot buzz. Jointly, Nadia and Armin shaped the brand-new dance track: "Feels So Good" and are currently carrying out a rigorous tour schedule on the "Armin Only Mirage" tour. "Armin Only" is an entirely sold-out world tour, filling arenas with tens of thousands of fans nightly.
Nadia Ali has continually proven her value with a growing list of global hits and chart-toppers that has expanded progressively over the years. These include: "Rapture", "At The End", "Kiss You", and a #1 US Billboard Dance Chart hit with "Is It Love" in 2006. Nadia's solo album "Embers" was released in 2009 and "Fantasy" soon followed, serving as a prologue to "Queen of Clubs Trilogy: Best of Nadia Ali Remixed". In 2010, Nadia was nominated for Best Progressive/Tech House Track for "Love Story" at the International Dance Music Awards at the Winter Music Conference. She then neatly closed out the year 2010 with a Grammy nomination for her song "Fantasy", under the "Best Re-mixed Recording" category. While Nadia has cultivated a score of industry accolades, 2010 marked the first occasion in which her work would receive the great honor and validation of a Grammy Nomination. If we are to learn anything from the pattern developing here, it could quite possibly be that Nadia Ali simply possesses both the clever intellect and raw talent required to amass this kind of staying power… and that this past decade has only been the beginning.
PETE WENTZ
A particularly polarizing musician -- something of a pop-punk figurehead and entrepreneur in a scene that once prided itself on having no celebrity -- Pete Wentz made a name for himself in the early 2000s as the outspoken bassist and lyricist for the popular Chicago pop-punk unit Fall Out Boy. Born Peter Lewis Kingston Wentz III in the Chicago suburb of Wilmette, Wentz (b. June 5, 1979) grew up an avid soccer player and music fan. He loved the Smiths, learned to play piano at a young age, and eventually picked up the bass guitar, deciding he wanted to be in a punk band. At age 14, during his freshmen year of high school, Wentz started regularly skipping school, so much so that his parents were ultimately persuaded to send him to a tough-love boot camp for eight weeks to straighten him out. Hating every second, Wentz learned to internalize his emotions during the program; later on, music and writing thus became one of his only real outlets for expression -- the highly personal nature of his lyrics and his clever wordplay easily resonated with fans and contributed to Fall Out Boy's popularity.
