Małgorzata Jamroży was born on 30 June 1991 in Stargard Szczeciński. Raised in Ińsk, a small town near Stargard, she moved to Szczecin when she was 16. In an interview in Newsweek she recalled:
We [with Gosia Głodek, now a make-up artist] used to visit second-hand shops and spend all our pocket money there. We used to visit clubs at night, theoretically you can only enter them if you are 21 or older, but in reality one bright smile lets you in. Every Wednesday in Rocker there was a karaoke competition with a grand prize of 100zl, which we usually won, so we could party a little bit.
She finished music school specialising in vocals, and had private singing classes. She later graduated in costumography and clothing design in Warsaw.
In Szczecin she started to cover popular songs in one of the clubs, her covers also made their way to Youtube. There she was found by a talent manager.
2009 was the year of her TV debut. She appeared in the TV show Szansa na Sukces, where amateur singers perform random covers of popular pop songs. Margaret won with her staging of Brodka’s Znam Cię Na Pamięć.
In 2010 she starred in the musical Rent in Szczecin, and she also recorded a few songs with the band Gosia Jamroży Project. A year after that she started her own fashion blog, margaret-j.blogspot.com. There she presented her designs, which in turn sparked the interest of a Polish TV station, TVN Style. The blog flourished for a few years, but after some time, due to her musical success, she had to stop writing there. Her last post is from June 2015.
Her musical career started to take off in 2012. That year she appeared at the TopTrendy festival with a song Thank You Very Much written by Swedish composers Joakim Buddee and Thomas Karlsson. In February of the following year a controversial music video to said song appeared on Youtube. Everyone except for Margaret appeared naked in this clip, which caused it to be taken down and then reuploaded a number of times. Vimeo, another video sharing website, did not cause that much trouble. The song appeared on charts in Austria, Germany, and Italy. It’s included on the All I Need EP from July 2013.
August 2014 marked the release of Margaret’s first longplay Add The Blonde, which consists of all the songs from All I Need and 8 new compositions. Among them was Start A Fire, a track created for Volleyball World Cup 2014 that took place in Poland. It’s the first song on which Margaret sings in Polish. The album was produced by British producer Ant Whiting and Swedes Joakim Buddee and Martin Eriksson, who also composed most of the material on Add The Blonde.
In September 2015 the singer, together with veterans of TV entertainment Wojciech Pijanowski and Krzysztof Szewczyk, started hosting Retromania on TVP 1. Broadcast on Saturday afternoons, it did not take off and was cancelled after only 2 months, with just 10 episodes aired. Its cancellation coincided with the release of Margaret’s second album Just The Two Of Us. The album, heavily influenced by jazz music, was co-created with Canadian producer and vocalist Matt Dusk.
In 2016 her single Cool Me Down was released. With that song she tried her luck in the Polish Eurovision contest. She was a front-runner, but ended up coming second, as Michał Szpak won with his song Color Of Your Life thanks to viewers’ votes. He ended up 8th out of 26 participants in the main contest.
She’s won many awards, but so far the most important ones is the title of Best Polish Artist, which she was awarded at MTV’s European Music Awards in 2015 and 2016. These titles contributed to her already respectable popularity. As a result, she was invited to perform at the biggest Polish festivals in Opole and Sopot.
Jacek Świąder, January 2017. Translated by AS
Discography:
2013 – All I Need
2014 – Add The Blonde
2015 – Just The Two Of Us
