Neja

Neja, born Agnese Cacciola, is an Italian singer born on 15 August 1972 in Rivoli, in the Turin area.

From a young age she fell passionately in love with music and began performing with gospel choirs and jazz groups; as a teenager she realized her dream through dance music.

Her career took off with the hits “Restless” and “Shock!”, international successes. In 1999 she released “The Game”, the winning song of the show A Song For The Summer, which she performed at Festivalbar; she then went to Japan to promote the single, which also gave its name to her debut album. That ten-track album included pop songs like “Fairytale” and “Mum’s Day” while keeping a dance orientation — the dance remix of “Fairytale” circulated in Europe in January 2000.

She traveled to Germany to shoot a video distributed by Universal and released a new single, “Singin Nanana”, during a second appearance at Festivalbar that summer. In 2001 the singles “Time Flies” and “Back 4 The Morning” introduced her to the United States, where she performed in New York, Boston and San Antonio.

In 2002 she signed with Universal and focused more on pop. The summer hit “Looking For Something” brought her back to Festivalbar for a third time and paved the way for her second album, Hot Stuff, which included the single “To The Music”.

From 2003 to 2005 she performed for fans in Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and even in India as a representative of an Italian clothing brand.

In 2005 she signed with the Melodica label, which released her 11th single, “Who’s gonna be?”, a pop song issued in several remixes (reggae, dance, rock…). In 2007, with a new production team composed of Ivan Russo (Atollo records) and French DJ Benjamin Braxton (Sound4label), she returned to dance music with the single “Catwalk”, first released in France, while working on her third album.

2008 was a period of experimentation when she returned to her first loves, jazz, recording Acousticlub, an album of rearranged acoustic and jazzy covers (such as “Sweet Dreams”, “Papa Don’t Preach”, “Man in the Mirror”, “Hit Me Baby One More Time…”) as well as new versions of her own tracks (“Destiny” and “The Game”). She enjoyed the project so much that she recorded another similar album, 133 Sushiclub, in collaboration with guitarist Cristian Montgnani and bassist Larry Mancini.

In 2009 she devoted herself again to dance music with the single “Loving You”, produced in collaboration with two Turin DJs, Peter Damir and Gianluca Argante, promoted in the United Kingdom.