Hoku

Hailing from the Central Pacific island of Oahu, Hawaiian songstress Hoku Christian Ho was born on June 10th, 1981. The daughter of seasoned musician Don Ho, she honed her songwriting skills under his guidance, and the pair often performed together in her youth. Relocating to California for university, she began to record original demos under the mononym Hoku, and had soon attracted a $300,000 record deal from Universal imprint Geffen Records. By January 2000, she had made her debut with “Another Dumb Blonde”, a vocoded dance-pop number penned by Rock Mafia, which served as the theme for the Nickelodeon comedy film Snow Day. The song reached #27 on the Billboard Hot 100, shifting 600,000 units and eventually being named the fourteenth most popular single of the year in the US. In awe at this response, Ho immediately halted her studies and knuckled down in the studio, hard at work on an eponymous debut album brimming with similarly wholesome teen pop efforts. Within three months, the LP was completed and released, although it disappointed commercially, peaking at #151 in the US charts. Hoku had more luck with her 2001 single “Perfect Day”, which appeared in the box office smash Legally Blonde and was set to serve as the lead single from a sophomore album on Geffen. This project never materialised, however, as Hoku found herself increasingly at odds with the label in regard to the ostensibly non-Christian way in which she was being marketed. She returned in 2008 with an obscure five-track EP entitled Listen Up before taking a lengthy hiatus, reemerging in 2018 with a matured sound on the independent EP Called By Name. The following year, Hoku shared an original Christmas song entitled “The World Slept On”, which was swiftly followed by a rousing, pared-back single entitled “Greater” in 2020.