- Album list
- Singer Intro
Kiyomi Angela Aki (安藝 聖世美 アンジェラ Aki Kiyomi Anjera?, born September 15, 1977) known professionally as Angela Aki (アンジェラ・アキ Anjera Aki?), is a pop singer, songwriter, and pianist born in Itano, Tokushima, Japan to a Japanese father and an Italian-American mother.
Early life
Aki was born in the small town of Itano, population 14,600, in the mostly rural island of Shikoku.
Aki began to take piano lessons when she was three years old and lived in Tokushima through sixth grade, and spent her junior high school days in Okayama. She has admitted that growing up in rural Japan proved very difficult, as she was bullied and she turned to the piano as an escape from the isolation she felt. She grew up listening to a mix of enka, The Carpenters and The Bee Gees.
Aki moved to Hawaii when she was fifteen years old and attended the Hawaii Preparatory Academy, but transferred to and graduated from Iolani School. She speaks English and Japanese. She was immersed in music there for four years. She graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and majored in political science.
Personal life
Angela's first marriage was to an engineer, producer and artist Tony Alany, who co-produced her first album These Words in Vienna, Virginia, USA. On March 9, 2007, Aki announced that she had married Japanese A&R director and publisher Taro Hamano, and made public that she had been briefly married previously and got divorced. In September 2011, she announced that she was pregnant. In February 2012, she announced that she had given birth to her first child, a baby boy.
She is good friends with J-Pop star Yuna Ito. Both singers attended the same Japanese language school.
Janis Ian is her mentor and friend.
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