Biography
L.E.J, short for Lucie, Élisa and Juliette, sometimes Elijay, is a French band composed of three women from Saint-Denis, a city in Paris' suburbs. They became famous by condensing numerous top songs from the summer of 2015 into a mashup performance. Their song mashup Summer 2015 had millions of plays on YouTube as of August 2015 and was thus a global hit in less than a month. Their music is based on classical and world music, described by MTV reviewer Joseph Lamour as "eclectic". According to Seventeen magazine, the three vocalists have been best friends since childhood, and have been performing together since 2013. Reviewer Hannah Orenstein described their sound as "pared-down but strong." Juliette plays the cello and sings backups while Elisa and Lucie are the main singers.
All three members were born in 1993: Lucie on 21 November, Elisa on 26 August, and Juliette on 3 September. They are childhood friends from Saint Denis, and have known each other since they were toddlers. Their passion has always been music: Juliette studied cello at the Conservatoire de Saint-Denis, and Lucie and Elisa studied vocal technique at the Maîtrise de Radio France, a prestigious French singing school, acquiring solid classical training. Lucie Lebrun also plays the piano and the saxophone, and Elisa Paris plays the piano and the harp.
In October 2013, they competed in a contest organized by the French band Tryo, covering one of their songs with vocal harmonies. It was the first time they had all sung together as a band. They won the contest and got to perform for a large audience; at that point, according to one source, the group did not yet have a name. They decided to go on with the band and kept posting videos on their YouTube channel, covering various artists and posting their first summer mashup in 2014. To a large extent, the group connected with listeners through social networks.
They signed a contract with Live Nation Entertainment, and started opening for artists in France, such as Grand Corps Malade. On 22 June 2015, they played as the opening act for Pharrell Williams in Monaco.
On 1 August 2015, they posted a mashup of 11 worldwide hits of 2015, Summer 2015. It was an immediate success, getting hundreds of thousands of views within two days. On 3 August, Time magazine shared their mashup which launched a craze around the video and brought them millions of views on YouTube in less than a month. French and international media took an immediate interest in the three young women, who were a bit overwhelmed by this unanticipated turn of events. Indeed, they had never intended their video to have such an impact and had not foreseen such a success. Elisa said in an interview that the women would not have worn their pajamas when recording Summer 2015 if they had known that the video would go viral.
In December 2015, L.E.J released their first album, entitled En attendant l'album, which contains 11 tracks, all cover songs but La Dalle, their first original composition. This collection includes a cover of Hanging Tree, the song from the Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1. L.E.J also performed Hanging Tree at the 9 November 2015 Paris Premiere of Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2. ...
Source: Article "L.E.J" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
