Anastacia

Anastacia: The Voice Nobody Knew How to Sell

By 1998 she was twenty-nine, unemployed, and seriously considering retraining as a child psychologist. A decade of auditions had produced the same verdict from label after label: the voice was extraordinary and completely unmarketable, because nobody could work out how to sell a small white woman who sounded like that. "They told me how I should dress, how I should move, what I should think," she said later. Then she auditioned for an MTV talent show called *The Cut* with a song she had written herself, "Not That Kind," and Elton John and Michael Jackson were among those who noticed. Two years later she had a global number one. As she puts it: "My career started properly when I was 30. I often say I was like a fine wine, I took a long time to mature."

Chicago, Broadway, and Crohn's

Anastacia Lyn Newkirk was born in Chicago on 17 September 1968, the second of three children in a household of performers. Her mother, Diane Hurley, was a Broadway actress of Irish descent who chose her daughter's name out of a love of Russian literature. Her father, Robert Newkirk, was of German descent, sang in East Coast clubs, and lived with bipolar disorder; he left the family when Anastacia was seven. Her mother subsequently gave up her Broadway career to care for Anastacia's autistic brother.

The body announced itself early. She was diagnosed with Crohn's disease at thirteen. The condition stayed dormant until she was nineteen, when a producer suggested she needed a dancer's physique and she attempted a severe diet; her intestines collapsed and she was forced to take the illness seriously. She was also dyslexic, and finished at Manhattan's Professional Children's School — where her classmates included River Phoenix, Christian Slater and Ricki Lake — with difficulty. "I felt very awkward as a teenager," she has said. "I wanted blue eyes, I wanted to be taller, I wore glasses."

Twelve Years of Other Jobs

The résumé before the record deal reads like a survey of low-wage America: aerobics instructor, secretary, hairdresser, sales assistant, cashier, waitress, pastry-shop worker. She had been dancing professionally since 1983, from the New York club 1018, where she picked up house music and freestyle. From 1990 she sang backing vocals — at weddings, with the pop singer Tiffany, behind Jamie Foxx in 1994 and Paula Abdul in 1995, and with the covers band The Kraze from 1997. Steven Spielberg hired her to sing at his wedding in 1991.

None of it converted. The obstacle was categorical rather than musical: an industry organised by format could not place a voice that came out of soul and gospel in a body that marketing departments filed under pop. It took a television format with a live audience to bypass the gatekeepers entirely.

Sprock

She signed with Daylight/Epic under Sony in March 1999. *Not That Kind* was released on 13 June 2000, and the single "I'm Outta Love" went to number one in Belgium, Australia and New Zealand and to number six in the UK and Germany. The album passed five million copies by 2006, and in 2001 she took the World Music Award for the world's best-selling new female pop artist.

She named the sound herself: "sprock," soul plus pop plus rock, an unlovely coinage for a genuinely awkward-to-classify hybrid. *Freak of Nature* followed in 2001, going triple platinum in the UK and selling seven million worldwide. In 2002 she sang "Boom" at the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup, appeared at VH1 Divas Las Vegas alongside Celine Dion, Shakira and Cher, and in 2003 performed at Nelson Mandela's 46664 AIDS awareness concert. *Anastacia* (2004) was her biggest album to that point; its single "Left Outside Alone" spent fifteen consecutive weeks at number one on the European Billboard chart.

The geography of that success is the strange fact of her career. She has sold more than 50 million records and holds 227 gold and platinum certifications, almost all of it in Europe, Oceania, Asia, Africa and South America. In the United States, where she was born and raised, she has never been more than a moderate chart presence.

2003, and 2013

In January 2003, preparing for breast reduction surgery, she had a routine mammogram. It found cancer. She had surgery and radiotherapy, and afterwards set up the Anastacia Fund with Estée Lauder to push breast cancer awareness among women under thirty-five — a demographic then largely ignored by screening advice.

On 27 February 2013 she announced a second diagnosis and cancelled her European tour. This time she had a double mastectomy. Her account of it is characteristically unsentimental: "It's a great irony in my life that I absolutely hated my breasts and then I got breast cancer." Of the reconstruction she says the results are "my twin set and they are just awesome," and that the whole experience delivered a femininity she had never previously felt. In 2013 she became only the second woman to receive the Humanitarian Award at the GQ Men of the Year Awards.

The albums kept coming: *Heavy Rotation* (2008) after a move to Mercury, the covers record *It's a Man's World* (2012), *Resurrection* (2014) — reviewed warmly and pointedly titled — *Evolution* (2017), and *Our Songs* (2023), a set of German-language reinterpretations that went gold in Germany. She won the third season of *The Masked Singer Australia* in 2021 as the Vampire, the first American to take the title, and in 2025 began a twenty-fifth anniversary *Not That Kind* tour. She also lives with supraventricular tachycardia, a heart condition, and has never stopped touring for long.

Why Anastacia Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the claim rests on craft and character, not intellect, and it is stronger on both counts than her critics allow.

The craft is the instrument and the control of it. Anastacia possesses a genuinely unusual voice — enormous, rasping, gospel-inflected, and coming out of a very small frame, which produced the nickname "the little lady with the big voice" and, less kindly, a decade of confused A&R executives. She is not merely a singer handed material: she wrote "Not That Kind," the song that got her signed, and she named and defined her own hybrid genre when the industry could not. That is authorship, and it is why she survived the transition from novelty to catalogue artist.

The character is the more remarkable part, and it should be described precisely rather than sentimentally. She built a global career starting at thirty, after twelve years of rejection, while managing Crohn's disease diagnosed at thirteen, dyslexia, and a heart arrhythmia — then had it interrupted by cancer twice, at the commercial peak and again a decade later, and rebuilt it both times. She turned the first diagnosis into a public health campaign aimed at women too young to be screened.

The counter-case is straightforward. She is not a musical innovator; "sprock" is a marketing word for a well-executed blend rather than a new form, and her catalogue is professional mainstream pop-rock, not experiment. She has never cracked the American market. Genius, in the sense used of composers and inventors, overstates it. What is fair to say is that she has an exceptional physical gift, an unusually clear-eyed sense of what to do with it, and a tolerance for adversity that would have ended most careers three separate times.

Legacy

Anastacia's durability is her real signature: 50 million records, a quarter-century tour running in 2025, and a European audience that adopted her when her own country did not. The Anastacia Fund's argument — that breast cancer is not only an older woman's disease — has outlived the news cycle that produced it.

Achievements

• Educated at Professional Children's School
• Worked as singer, singer-songwriter and author