Her career may have been in a slight lull media exposure-wise outside of avid fans, but to finish out 2015, Joss Stone is winning big. She has been named Reggae Artist Of The Year for her work with Damian Marley and other artists on her latest album Water For Your Soul, which dropped this past July. The album reached the top of both the reggae albums chart as well as the reggae artists chart.
Billboard named Stone Reggae Artist Of The Year and based a lot of the title on sales, as Water For Your Soul sold 29,000 copies in the US alone, according to NME. The album is Stone's seventh studio album and additionally featured a collaboration with Dennis Bovell.
The Daily Beast's Stereo Williams weighed in on the issue of whether or not this honor is indeed a good thing for Stone. Williams wrote, "The mainstream tends to ignore the variety of Black music until a white face dabbles in it."
The journalist further wrote, "And Stone enjoying commercial success in a genre she happens to be visiting this week indicates that record buyers are willing to accept her genre-hopping. As Billboard accolades and awards shows highlight the whiteness of pop consumer tastes, music fans should note and take stock of their biases."
He also said, "Joss Stone has traditionally been recognized as a 'neo-soul' artist, having initially arrived in the early 2000s when that particular designation was still trendy, but she's recorded music ranging from funk to rock to vintage soul to reggae."
Earlier in 2015, Joss Stone also formed a group with remaining members of the Stone Temple Pilots to form the Joss Stone Temple Pilots. The group performed for Jimmy Kimmel's Mash-Up Mondays series on his show Jimmy Kimmel Live. The series premise is to bring together two acts each Monday to form a temporary group. When the Joss Stone Temple Pilots performed in November, they did a cover of STP's "Interstate Love Song," which was released back in 1994.
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