Born and raised in that faceless jungle of urban sprawl between Florida City and Miami as Cristina Maria Gilbert, J Blue grew up in a Baptist family, singing in church on Sundays. Her initial foray into music led her into eight years of full-time ministry with her husband and college sweetheart. Yet she found her life to be empty.

“And then something clicked in me,” she says. “I realized that I spent my whole life following a set path that I thought I was supposed to follow, but I was not happy as a person.”

And so, she walked away. The music, she was ecstatic to discover, was still there, waiting for her. She donned the name J Blue in honor of her late father, who was an early inspiration to her creativity, and the songs began to pour out of her, some profoundly autobiographical, some using newfound poetic license to exorcise demons, celebrate a new love or declare her hard-won independence.

In her music, J tells the unvarnished truth about her life, in a voice filled with passion, pain, and experience. There’s blood in her lyrics, spilled over time along the rocky road that led her to this point. And the music, blending elements of jazz, gospel, R&B, hip hop and every other sound she’d absorbed, is, in the final judgment, all hers. There’s only one J Blue, making this dynamic, richly textured, and exceedingly soulful music.