TRENDING NOW
Briana Babineaux
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By JeVaughn Martin
The passionate voice of urban inspirational
singer Bri (Briana Babineaux) is carving out a
unique niche for the 21-year old college student.
In less than one year, she’s become one of the
most buzzed about singers on social media and
counts superstars like Rhianna, Brandy and Drake
among her nearly 400,000 I nstagram fans.
Before she was ever heard on terrestrial radio,
hundreds of thousands of fans enjoyed hearing her heartfelt cover songs on YouTube. After
turning down several offers to record R&B music,
the Louisiana native released her debut gospel
song “I’ll Be The One” this past June and watched
it spring onto four different Billboard Magazine
sales charts including the Gospel Digital Songs
chart where it hit the top spot.
Since that time, the song has now become a
Billboard Top 12 Gospel Airplay chart hit and
is inciting demand for Bri’s much-anticipated
inaugural album ‘Keys To My Heart’ (Marquis
Boone Enterprises, LLC/TyscotRecords, LLC) that
releases March 25, 2016.
Bri’s journey to the top started on the island of
Hawaii where she was born August 26, 1994. Her
father was stationed there during his stint with
The Marines but he moved his family back to his
hometown of Lafayette, Louisiana when Bri was
three months old. Bri’s parents broke up when
she was two years old and she was later raised by
her mother and stepfather who is a pastor at
Refuge Temple Ministries in the city. She began
to sing in the church at the age of five as a member of choirs and praise teams and continues to do
so to this day. It was just something she did for
fun at the time.
“I never planned to become a professional singer,” she
laughs. Instead, she was a gifted athlete, excelling in
basketball and volleyball at the city’s Northside High
School. Bri eventually earned a track scholarship to
McNeese State University but after a semester she lost
interest in running and moved on to the University
of Louisiana at Lafayette as a criminal justice major.
“At that point I was focused on becoming an attorney,” she says.
Then, fate entered. Last fall Bri was in a depressed
state after a romantic breakup when some friends
encouraged her to go out with them to get her mind
off of her heartache. They were fooling around when
she started to sing Tonex’s “Make Me Over”. One
of her friends posted a camera phone video of it
on YouTube around 3:00 AM and within hours her
riveting cover had gone viral. “I guess I was releasing
all of my hurt and emotion out through the song,” Bri
recalls.
That one video kicked off the #BriNation phenomenon and her new fans began to request that she sing
specific songs. She began to cover a variety of songs
on social media and with each new video her fan
base increased to the point that Bri was being courted
by some of the top R&B producers to sign with their
major labelc ompanies, but there was a problem. “I
didn’t want to sing R&B,” she confesses. “I really
don’t even listen to much R&B music. If I was going
to sing for anybody, I wanted to sing for God.”
Bri ended up signing with Marquis Boone Enterprises, LLC, which already experienced tremendous
success launching the career of former elementary
school teacher Casey J who’s break-out song “Fill Me
Up” spent fourteen non-consecutive weeks at #1 on
the Billboard Gospel AirPlay chart and anchored her
first album ‘The Truth’(Marquis Boone Enterprises,
LLC/Tyscot Records, LLC) that peaked at #1* Music
& Entertainment to bring his vision to life.
From Internet Sensation
to the Top of the
Music Charts!