Sarai was born and raised by her single mother in the working-class city of Kingston, New York in upstate Ulster County. While her mom listened to albums by Fleetwood Mac and various other rock groups, her older brother brought home what Sarai calls "the harder stuff"including seminal hip-hop albums by Run-DMC, Public Enemy, and N.W.A.

"I'm a straight MTV baby. I was born with MTV," she admits. "So I didn't start to fully experience hip-hop until the era of Biggie, Tupac, Nas, and Jay-Z. By that time I was old enough to actually absorb what they were saying."

In grade school and junior high, Sarai tried her hand at several musical instruments. But it was the power of the word that moved her most. "Even as a young kid, I was in plays at school, I was in the chorus, and I was trying my hand at poetry. I've always felt like I was meant to be a performer, but I'd never written an actual rhyme until I was 15. I remember sitting around with some friends at my kitchen table, and we wrote this little joke rhyme about the girls in our town."

To help support her family, Sarai worked "about 50 different jobs" and made plans to attend community college in Kingston. But at 17, she and a girlfriend took a vacation to Atlantaand fate stepped in.

"We stopped at a gas station and my friend starts talking to these guys at the gas station. They tell her they have a studio, just down the street, and she says 'hey, my girlfriend can flow!'

"Now, I'm always polite to strangers but I don't normally chit-chat with them at gas stations. But she insisted so I did a flow for themand about five minutes later, we were in their studio. That's where I met L.J. Sutton a/k/a Chocolate Starr. She's a partner in Infra Red Entertainment and later produced some of the tracks on my album."

Sarai began visiting Atlanta often, doing demos and taking meetings. In 2000, she moved there permanently. "I like the weather, and generally I like the attitude. But people do move slower than in New Yorkeven in Kingston!"

Rather than depleting her creativity, the completion of her album seemed to open up new vistas for Sarai. "I like to watch TV, I like to chill with my girlfriends, but mostly I've been writing a lot. I'll have the headphones on, putting words to the tracks. Or sometimes I'll just start writing a poem and set it to a beat later on. That's usually the deepest stuff I've come up with."

"Writing rhymes is just like writing a novel or a poemyou use whatever raw material you're given. You can't limit yourself to your own life story. Sometimes you have to put yourself in an-other person's place and think, how would she feel about this?

"Drugs, teen pregnancy, homelessness, broken families. I've seen all these situations up close. Success would just give me a whole new set of issues to deal with."

- saraimusic.com