Miguel Jontel Pimentel is a singer, songwriter and producer hailing from San Pedro, California, United States who was born on the 23rd of October 1985. Since making his debut in 1998, he has released two studio albums, five mixtapes and nine singles.
Miguel Pimentel grew up surrounded by music. Even after his parents split when he was eight, he was still very much in thrall to the classic rhythm and blues that his mother coveted, and his father’s more diverse tastes in hip-hop, funk and jazz. Needless to say it rubbed off on the young Pimentel, who at the age of five wanted to be a dancer but changed his aspirations at 13. The very next year he began writing songs and developing them on an old four-track recorder that he borrowed from his uncle, and before he’d even finished high school he’d struck up a friendship with a member of a local production team called the Drop Squad.
By the time he was 15, Pimentel had signed a deal with the Drop Squad to produce his records, and over the next four years the two began making music and releasing it onto the internet. This paid off in 2004 when he signed a record deal with the independent record label Black Ice. He spent two years making his debut record but it was shelved mere months before release, a single and a video for “Getcha Hands Up” was released but even at 21 years old Pimentel was a savvy guy. He had already moved on from the sound that he’d developed with the label and walked away from his deal to find somewhere he could develop artistically.
Turns out this was the best idea he could have at the time, but it still took a year before anything else started happening. Near the end of that year, Pimentel’s manager submitted an album’s worth of songs to Mark Pitts, the man who would eventually become president of Urban music at RCA Records. Pitts was impressed and called a meeting with Pimentel in October of 2007, The following month, he had a record deal with Jive Records and almost immediately afterwards, he began work on his debut record “All I Want Is You”. Pimentel strengthened his profile by working with Usher and Asher Roth but Black Ice Records managed to delay the release of his album by a couple of years, suing him for breach of contract.
As if that wasn’t enough Jive Records was in the process of going under when the album was released in November 2010, and the album tanked due to lack of promotion. At least initially, it did. However its title track started to get steady radio airplay and that, combined with opening for both Trey Songz and Usher, made the album into a sleeper hit, ultimately spending 45 weeks on the Billboard Album chart and selling over 400’000 copies in the U.S alone. Jive Records was finally shut down and absorbed by RCA Records in 2012, and with Pitts the head of urban music, Pimentel signed with RCA and in October, released his first bona-fide hit album.
His second effort “Kaleidoscope Dream” went straight in at number three and he had his first top twenty hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in the form of its lead single “Adorn”. Pimentel was finally a legitimate pop star, and ever since then his star has just risen and risen, leading to sold out concerts all over the world and a million selling collaboration with the one and only Mariah Carey in the form of “#Beautiful”. Clearly, this is an artist who could quite easily achieve greatness in the very near future, he’s at the peak of his powers and we’re lucky enough to watch it unfold in real time. Highly recommended.
The Strokes
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