We Speak Entertainment
CHART-TOPPING GOSPEL TRIO G.I. NEW ALBUM “WINNING” AVAILABLE NOW
“Pray And Don’t Worry” is one of the hottest gospel songs of 2017. The inspiring urban-flavored track with the trap drum loop and slick vocals scorched its way to the Top Ten on Billboard Magazine’s prestigious Gospel Airplay and Hot Gospel Songs charts. It’s also earned the Richmond, Virginia-based trio known as G.I. its first Stellar Gospel Music Award nomination earlier this year but this is no overnight success story. Over a period of years, the group has endured personnel changes, broken promises from record industry leaders and growing pains within the gospel music genre itself. In spite of it all, G.I. has played the game well and is now winning. G.I.’s new album Winning (BGA Music Group/Shanachie) is available now. The group’s highly anticipated third album features their new single “We Win” as well as a cameo from TV One’s R&B Diva, Keke Wyatt. “All the songs have a similar theme as far as the elements we need to win in every aspect of life,” says Branden Anderson, the group’s mellow mastermind and co-founder. “Whether it be your spiritual life, on your job, or in your marriage. These songs all deal with some level of winning.”
We Speak Entertainment
IRENE MICHAELS JOINS THE RECORDING ACADEMY — AND WHAT THAT VOTE ACTUALLY MEANS
Awards nominations tell an audience an artist’s work has been noticed. Recording Academy Voting Membership tells a different story: that the artist has been recognized as a peer within the industry itself. Irene Michaels was recently named a Voting Member of the Recording Academy — the organization behind the Grammy Awards — and the distinction carries weight well beyond a title on a bio page.
Voting Membership isn’t handed out casually. It’s reserved for performers, songwriters, producers, engineers, and other creators actively working in the recording industry, and it comes with real influence: Voting Members are the people who ultimately determine Grammy nominees and winners each year. For an artist to be recognized at that level is, in effect, the industry saying her work belongs in the same conversation as the artists and professionals shaping the awards themselves.
That’s a meaningful marker for Michaels’ ongoing music career, which has moved from EPs and singles to Josie Music Award recognition and now into this kind of institutional standing. It reframes her not just as an artist building a catalog, but as a working member of the community that evaluates and honors that catalog industry-wide — someone whose judgment on music now carries an official vote.
It also adds context to everything else happening in her 2026: a triple nomination at the 12th Annual Josie Music Awards, an EP in Golden that’s earning recognition on its own merits, and a career that has spent the last several years steadily building credibility as a serious recording artist rather than a novelty comeback story. Recording Academy membership doesn’t arrive for artists still proving themselves — it arrives for artists the industry has already decided are part of it.
For Irene Michaels, whose career has spanned modeling, acting, publishing, and now music across multiple decades, the Recording Academy recognition is less a single headline than another data point in a larger pattern: an artist whose reinvention keeps being met, at every stage, with the industry taking her seriously.
-
We Speak Events6 days agoHOT ROD Power Fest Brings Two Days Of Horsepower To Atlanta
-
We Speak Music5 days agoReggie Benjamin Reimagines The Classics On Harmony In Blue: The Duets
-
We Speak Actors1 week agoActress Amber Lily Butterworth on Her Growing Career in Film
-
We Speak Music1 week agoDysmusia Keeps “In your eyes” Honest, Warm And Straight To The Point