If you have the privilege of seeing Ledisi live, or live from your laptop via YouTube, a few things are obvious: confident stage presence, amazing pipes, great audience participation. What you don't get at first glance is the ‘little soul sister that could' has some serious hustle in her. Besides creating and running her own label, LeSun Records, Ledisi keeps herself busy with a constant touring schedule and the occasional show-stopping TV performance. She said it herself, "Never do anything exactly like the cover." Seeing Ledisi pay tribute to Ella Fitzgerald on PBS' Great Performances earlier in 2007 with "Blues in the Night" showed why Ledisi is often called on for her renditions of the classics and yet could never survive in a cover band. She attributes doing things ‘her own kinda way' to her popularity, a common generalization, yet a telling indictment of why no band or label can truly hold her.

"I think the best thing is to do it yourself first. Really...I did shop my record [Soulsinger] around and this was right before Jill [Scott] came out. Our records came out at the same time. I was just underground and she was on the major thing. I shopped it around a year before 2000 and I got a lot of nice rejection letters. They were beautiful letters of rejection because they didn't know what to do with it."

Tired of polite dismissals, Ledisi and former partner and keyboardist, Sundra Manning, created LeSun Records. Still in existence almost eight years later, LeSun's focus is more on distributing Ledisi's previous catalog. But now with more visibility, the artist's latest project, "Lost and Found," finds her in unfamiliar, but welcome territory: on a major label.

"It's a great label. It took me a year to sign with Verve [Records]. Almost 2 years. It took me a while to make that decision. It was hard, but I'm happy I did because they are supportive. I'm on the radio finally. I had two stations playing me, that's it, and a few college radio stations. A lot of Internet radio before that. They have me everywhere now. Something about it is working."

After wearing the hats of CEO, artist, distributor and publicist, you can't blame her for wanting some part of this process to be simplified. Advocate that she is for the independent route, Ledisi keeps the rose-colored glasses in the case. She passionately recalls her leaner years of hard work and scraping by to get her career jumpstarted.

"We were from the ground up. It was two people using UPS and FedEx and getting phone calls, ‘Can you ship this out?' and then have to go onstage and perform, take care of the band, the booking...We were a whole company and spent all of our money pouring it back into the company to keep it afloat, to keep pressing up CDs. There wasn't fifteen people, there wasn't twenty people or thirty or fifty...And then I have to get up there and pretend like everything's great, when really I'm eating Cup of Noodles at a hotel. I had a sold-out show and at the end of the night I would get $100. That wasn't fun. And I still can't get better gigs because I'm not on the radio. I don't have enough money to get a radio promoter to put me on or I ran out of money to pay my publicist. I mean, that's real talk...It's tough."

After almost leaving the music industry altogether, Ledisi is at home on Verve, where she has access to a larger audience, a machine working to get her name out to the public and most importantly, creative freedom - freedom to continue doing side projects and to hold on to her masters.

"It's a blessing. Verve really left me alone. Most labels, they are on their artists. Verve really let me be myself. They didn't touch that because they knew my audience wanted me to be me... I did it at a perfect time because it's on my terms."

She may not have to sell CDs out of her car anymore or trick storeowners into carrying her albums by telling fans at shows they could find it there, but Ledisi is far from comfortable with her newfound success. "Lost and Found" evolved out of Ledisi taking a ‘less think, more do' approach and thanks to co-producer and keyboardist Rex Rideout, came back from overwhelming frustration.

"Nothing was planned with this record. I didn't say, ‘Ooh, this is going to have a live feel.' Uh-uh. None of that happened. It was more of, ‘Let's just get my friend Lil John in to play on this track and then we gonna call up such and such ‘cause I wanna do it like this. And let's just add some scratching noise on that. That'll be dope.' ‘Just go in and do it...It's Oz. I see the other side of Oz now."

- Candace L. 

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