Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast
from BBC Radio 4. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury,
that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
For rights reasons, the music's shorter than on the original broadcast,
but you can find a version with longer music tracks on BBC Sounds.
Listeners will also get access to episodes 28 days earlier than everyone else.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the singer, songwriter and musician Chaka Khan.
She's a music icon, a vocal powerhouse whose range encompasses folk, soul, disco, jazz, pop and beyond.
An 11-time Grammy winner and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame alumnus, her career has spanned six consecutive decades
and given us classics, including I'm Every Woman, Ain't Nobody and I Feel For You.
She sold an estimated 70 million records
and collaborated with all-time greats including Stevie Wonder, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell and Prince.
She grew up in Chicago in an artistic family surrounded by music.
At 13, she took the Yoruba name, Shaka, and by her late teens, she joined the band Rufus,
whose soar-away success paved the way for her breakout as a solo artist.
Her path took her from the Black Panther movement to the giddy heights of global superstardom.
Today, she lives on a farm in Georgia, surrounded by family, animals and, of course, music.
She says, Music balances me out.
It makes everything OK.