Taja Sevelle is a music recording artist, songwriter, novelist and inventor from Minneapolis, Minnesota[1] who began her music career in 1987 when she was signed to the Paisley Park Records label by Prince. In the same week, she was accepted into the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Sevelle's first single was "Love Is Contagious", which became her signature song. She recorded Fountains Free (1991) on Warner/Reprise/Paisley and Toys of Vanity (1997) on Sony, and has written songs with Burt Bacharach, Thom Bell, Prince, Nile Rodgers and Mark White of the Spin Doctors, among others. She has song catalogs with Warner Chappell Music Publishing and North Star Music as well as her own publishing company, OW Music. Including her own CDs, Taja has songwriting and singing credits on over 2.5 million records sold including Prince, Johnny Mathis and the original soundtrack of the motion picture “Lean On Me.”
By the time Taja Sevelle was 15, she had lived in the city, on a farm and in a remote forest near the Canadian border with no running water, electricity or access by car. She had studied in her own science lab complete with microscopes, single cell eukaryotic organisms, and data storage, she had plowed fields, tapped maple trees, learned the Morse code, managed a health food store before her fellow classmates had graduated from high school. She also became a Radio DJ and produced a many radio programs including her own radio show about food and nutrition. Her life took a twist when in the same week she was accepted into the Berklee College of Music, she was offered a record deal from Prince.
From Minneapolis to Hollywood, the first song Taja Sevelle had ever written, “Love is Contagious,” became a charted Billboard hit in America and Europe. Taja Sevelle recorded her third CD in Detroit for Sony 550. She began to see the amount of poverty due to job loss in the city of Detroit as well as the excess amount of unused land, and in 2005 she founded Urban Farming, an international 501c3 headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. The 501c3 Organization plants food on unused land and space and gives it to people suffering from hunger and food insecurity. The charity began with 3 gardens in Detroit and in that year gave away 1 ton of food. To date, Urban Farming has planted and facilitated the equivalent of over 50,000 community and residential gardens across the country and abroad, feeding over an estimated million people.
Taja Sevelle has also written a novel Rain On A River and is working on her next 2 novels, "The Garden Song" about her life and work with Urban Farming(TM), "The Joke", with screenplay adaptation "Cracking Up." Additionally, Sevelle invented a kitchen appliance and is partnered with Larry King of CNN and his wife, Shawn King on the invention. In the late 1990s, she founded the Matrix Music record label.
Taja Sevelle has studied at the University of Judaism, The University of Duluth, Minneapolis Technical Institute and Santa Monica College. She holds three United States Patents for her invention. Taja speaks all over the world and has been a featured speaker on the Yale Sustainable Agriculture Panel, Kellogg’s Panel at Marygrove College in Michigan, The Race, Place and The Environment after Katrina National Symposium in New Orleans, Food Desert Panel at the National Black Caucus in Washington, DC., The MACT convention of the Michigan Treasurers, and Michigan Governor Granholm’s Food Policy Symposium among many others. Taja Sevelle was appointed by Mayor Dave Bing to sit on the Detroit Food Policy Council. For her work with Urban Farming, Taja has received the Champion for Your Service Award from the Brayland Edwards Foundation, the Essence Magazine Green Award and The Garden Crusader Award from Gardener’s Supply among others. Urban Farming has also received numerous awards for the organization’s work in our communities.
Sevelle continues to record around the world and expand Urban Farming.
2.) Taja Sevelle
Taja Sevelle