A Canadian singer, songwriter, and actress known for incorporating spoken poetry and elements of hip-hop and electronica into her spontaneous indie rock, Kinnie Starr made her official solo debut with Tidy in 1996. She made her first feature film appearance in 2001 (Down and Out with the Dolls). A Juno Award nomination for best new artist followed her third LP, 2003's Sun Again. Starr continued to take acting roles in independent films into the 2010s, a decade that included the release of 2018's Feed the Fire, her eighth studio album.

Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Alida Kinnie Starr earned a degree in Women's Studies from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario before relocating to Vancouver to pursue a career in music. She formed her first band in 1992. Starr's first solo material, a cassette demo called Learning 2 Cook, arrived via Violent Inch Records in 1994. Her debut album, Tidy, followed on the same label in 1996.

Starr was briefly added to the roster of Island/Def Jam in 1997 but asked to be released from her contract due to subsequent acquisitions and mergers involving the label. A finished album for Def Jam titled Mending was shelved indefinitely. In the meantime, Starr toured as part of Lilith Fair. Returning to Violent Inch, she released Tune-Up in 2000 and Sun Again in 2003. A year later, Starr received her first Juno Award nomination, in the category of New Artist of the Year.

Starr released one more album with Violent Inch, 2006's Anything, before moving to Last Gang Records for 2010's A Different Day. In 2010, she also won her first Juno, for her production work on Aboriginal Album of the Year winner We Are by Digging Roots. That year, she also starred in the crime film New Eden.

Starr switched labels again, this time to Toronto-based Aporia Records, which issued Kiss It in 2013 and From Far Away in 2014. In 2016, she hosted and co-produced the documentary Play Your Gender, which examined the lack of female producers in the music industry (then estimated at less than five-percent). Following recovery from a brain injury sustained in a taxi-cab accident, she returned in 2018 with the social media-inspired Feed the Fire. ~ Marcy Donelson, Rovi