inspired him to go to Los Angeles. In LA, Shine became
a music consultant for an NFL player who asked him to
head up his record label which sparked his career even
further. He was flying back and forth to New York even
taking meeting with Bad Boy Records. After attending
a music conference while in New York called Writer’s
Block (by LaRonda Sutton, then head of Universal Music
Publishing). Lots of major music artists were there to
share their music and get it placed on many platforms.
The music consultant had a successful run in LA but
moved back to Chicago after the player decided not to
do music anymore. It was somewhere around this time,
Shine was at an event where No I.D. was speaking and
told him about an idea he had to start a seminar for
songwriters to hone their skills.
That’s when he came up with the idea to start Writing
Sessions with the backing of No I.D. and legendary DJ
Wayne Williams (Jive Records) which is still going strong
to this day. Kanye West attended the very first one. By
request, he announced No I.D. as his surprise guest and
the first song he played was, “You Don’t Know My
Name” by Alicia Keys which had not been released as of
yet. Writing Sessions had become very big in Chicago
with so many people wanting to attend. When Shine
felt like it was no longer getting the attention it should
get, he shut it down because he was smart enough
where he didn’t want to lose the momentum of the
name.
The Vice President of a DJ organization called the Soul
Selective DJs asked Kevin to help in rejuvenating the
Chicago music scene. This lead to him putting together
the Da Internz who co-produced Rihanna’s hit song
“Birthday Cake” and Nicki Minaj’s massive hit,
“Anaconda”. Kevin essentially became the connection
within the Chicago music scene building a relationship
with super producers Cappriccieo Scates and Donnie
Scantz. Shine started working with a group of talented
female writers who he submitted a song for MTV’s
Making of the Band (a reality show P. Diddy produced
in hopes of producing a new band).
The song was not accepted. They were making
frequent trips to Atlanta working with songwriters and
producers until they eventually relocated. After moving
here, Shine ran into one of Atlanta’s hottest producers
Jazze Pha who was scheduled to have a meeting with
legendary his good friend Wayne Williams who invited
him to the meeting. Shine and Williams went way back
from their time back in Chicago working on of R. Kelly’s
self-titled album and
earning a Grammy nomination. While in the meeting
Williams informed the successful music consultant that
he needed new writers and producers for projects he
was working on. Wayne asked Kevin to pick him up that
next day and for three days straight the pair hung out
and Williams liked what he had heard. Kevin worked
with Williams helping him with his artist Raheem
DeVaughn (“One Woman”) and also being instrumental
in signing Jacob Latimore (“Best Friend”). Through his
relationship with an Atlanta music engineer, Kevin was
able to get one of his girls featured on Ludacris’ “How
Low” album released in 2009 which ended being
nominated for a Grammy earning Kevin his second
nomination.
Kevin also relaunched Writing Sessions in Atlanta where
it blew up again and once it loss steam he shut it down
again. With all this success Shine winded up leaving Jive
for reasons that will remain private. After stepping
down from Jive Records, Kevin met Yoshika Green who
became his booking agent who got him booked in
twenty-five cities in one year to be a speaker.
In addition to that, he ended up getting the position
through Cappreccieo Scates to come aboard and be his
A&R for Universal Music Group. Again, Shine launched
Writing Sessions and this time adding producers in the
mix. He started getting more hip hop producers than
anything but after hearing so much foul language
content, he made the event more geared to
singer/songwriters. Kevin had the potential to turn it
into a television show but couldn’t see eye to eye with
the potential producers so they went their separate
ways. The successful music exec was still able to build
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