Kartinya
Image: th_kartinya071-retouch.jpg Hi everybody.  For those of you who don't know, my name is Kartinya.  First of all I would like to thank you for visiting my website, it means a lot to me.  Let's see, my story is pretty simple.  I am 20-something years old and originally from Little Rock, Arkansas.  I have always loved music, but I didn't always know that this is what I was put on Earth to do.  After I graduated high school I joined the Air Force.  The Air Force took me all around the world.  I went to Texas, North Dakota, Florida, South Korea, Japan, Seattle, Canada, Kansas, and then eventually the Air Force dropped me off in New Jersey.  Throughout my journey I had a lot of tremendous experiences that inspired me to write, and I met a lot of awesome musicians, writers, and producers.  My last year in the military is when I decided that I wanted to make writing, singing, and performing a career so I started going on auditions and working on a demo.  While I was working on trying to land that "big record deal", music became all work and no fun.  I actually started to hate it.  The bottom line was, the more involved I became in trying to get a major deal, the more I began to loose myself.  The lyrics I was singing weren't me.  I didn't sound like me.  I didn't even look like me anymore.  It was a very rude awakening, but I needed it.  I finally came to a point where I decided to stop trying to please everybody.  I decided to make music my way.  So in 2006 I started Sole Life Music, my indie record label and became my own musical boss.