Charlie Wilson Live with special guest Fantasia at Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul

Minnesota State Fair Grandstand Concert Series 2016

Charlie Wilson
with
special guest
Fantasia
at the
Minnesota State Fair

7:30 p.m. – 11:00pm. // Tickets: $40 – $55

Charlie Wilson is an R&B singer, songwriter and producer. Born in Tulsa, Okla., he got his start with his brothers Robert and Ronnie as the lead singer of The Gap Band. With 15 Top Ten R&B hits like “Outstanding,” “You Dropped A Bomb On Me,” and “Yearning For Your Love,” the group was one of the most popular funk bands of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Wilson’s first solo album Bridging the Gap garnered his first No. 1 Billboard Urban Adult Contemporary single “Without You.” The 2005 album Charlie, Last Name Wilson, featured R. Kelly, Justin Timberlake and will.i.am as producers and was certified gold. Other hits since then include “There Goes My Baby” and “You Are.” Wilson, a nine-time Grammy Award nominee and an important influencer to many artists today, has collaborated with Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, Rihanna, Beyoncé, Common and more. His latest album Forever Charlie features the singles “Goodnight Kisses” and “Touched By An Angel.”

Fantasia – Back in 2004, on the night of May 26, a then-19-year-old Fantasia Barrino stepped onto the American Idol stage and won top honors. After wowing television audiences with her vocal talent, the North Carolina native released her debut album, Free Yourself, which featured as its first single, “I Believe,” a song that made her the first artist in Billboard history to debut at #1 on the Hot 100 chart. Her second single, “Truth Is,” would later hold the #1 spot on the charts for 14 weeks. During 2006, she released her New York Times bestselling memoir, Life Is Not a Fairytale, starred as her younger self in the Lifetime movie of the same name and by year’s end, released her second album, entitled, simply, Fantasia, which included the hit single, “When I See U.” What followed were the coveted role of Celie in Broadway’s The Color Purple (for which she won a Theater World Award), a guest spot on The Simpsons and a two-season run of the VH1 reality series, Fantasia For Real. During the summer of 2011, she released her third album, Back to Me, which featured the Grammy-winning single, “Bittersweet.” To date, she’s sold nearly three million records and 1.5 million digital tracks, domestically. Looking toward the near future, she will expand her musical repertoire even further when she joins classical singer, Andrea Bocelli, for his world tour in summer 2013.

Listen to Fantasia‘s fifth studio album  ‪#‎TheDefinitionOf‬ on Spotify below, it was released on July 28th, 2016.