Solange at a DJ gig in Miami Beach. (Johnny Louis/WENN.com)
Solange with sis at Fashion Week. (Getty Images)
Solange’s son, Julez, with Uncle Jay-Z, Grandma Tina and Aunt Beyonce (with cam). (MAVRIXONLINE.COM)
Her sister is the best-selling female artist in the world. Her brother-in-law is hip-hop royalty, a man who wrote the modern anthem of New York City and is a part owner of the soon-to-be Brooklyn Nets.
But on a recent morning, Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s younger sister, is up before 8, walking her 7-year-old son, Julez, to the Brooklyn public school where he attends first grade.
After dropping him off, Solange lopes down the street, back to the rental apartment where she lives in Carroll Gardens. The building is an unassuming brownstone where a three-bedroom unit rents for $3,950 a month.
She wears funky sunglasses, knee-high boots and her hair in a short afro. She stuffs her hands into the pockets of her light-gray wool coat.
Solange, a soul singer with two albums under her belt and a side career as a DJ, doesn’t check her BlackBerry or listen to her iPod. She doesn’t even carry a purse.
She waves to the dry cleaner through the storefront window and stops to chat with a fellow parent.
The sister of the superstar is living the simple life in Brooklyn, where she moved last fall from Los Angeles. And she looks like the most relaxed New Yorker in town.
With her family connections, Solange, 25, could have been signed to Jay-Z’s record label, Roc-A-Fella, and spend every night hobnobbing with the glitterati and prancing down red carpets. With all the right connections, Solange could have been manufactured into a one-named, hit-producing pop princess.
But “the other Knowles” has never sought out A-list fame.
“I don’t want to get that far,” Solange told Essence.com, when asked about her sister’s career. “I feel really bad for my sister. I’m always like, ‘Oh, let’s go to the mall,’ or, ‘Let’s go here,’ and she can’t. I enjoy having that.”
Solange is currently putting the finishing touches on her third album, which she is producing independently with Devonté Hynes.
She has posed for magazine covers, had bit parts in movies, and is currently the face of Rimmel London, a makeup company.
But Solange, who looks remarkably like her famous sibling, isn’t noticed on her stroll through the neighborhood. And she doesn’t want to be.
“I’m not her and never will be,” she sang on the first track of her first album, “Solo Star,” released in 2002.
“No, I’m no sister, I’m just my God-given name,” she croons in the song, titled “God Given Name.”
Since then, Solange has carved out her own niche in Brooklyn.
“Listening to Dru Hill on my stoop, drinking warm cider, son on his skates, with my h-town crew,” she tweeted last month. (Her friends include indie rockers like Grizzly Bear and David Longstreth of the Dirty Projectors, who are her close friends and musical collaborators.)
“Perfect day at the park. Love my hood. #Brooklyn,” she tweeted last fall.
The down-to-earth sister even threw a birthday party for her son in a public park and has been spotted eschewing first class to fly coach.
Solange spends many evenings DJ’ing at Brooklyn Bowl in Williamsburg, and frequents unpretentious neighborhood eateries like Buttermilk Channel on Court Street.
“She’s accessible and regular,” said Mickey Boardman, the editorial director of Paper Magazine who has spent time with Solange. “When she needs to, she can be a strong diva, but generally she’s super cool. She’ll e-mail me when she’s around and say that she’d love to DJ a party. I think she’s weirdly a real person.
“I’ve never seen her throw her sister’s name around. I’ve seen them out together, and Solange seems to be just happily along for the ride.”
Peter Shapiro, a co-owner of Williamsburg’s Brooklyn Bowl who met Solange through her manager, said: “She’s got a great vibe, and she’s a really nice person.
“She weaves between one side of her life, which is her family and her connection to R&B, and the other side of her musical taste that runs more Brooklyn indie rock band. She’s in a unique position to bring together those two worlds. When she’s here, you look around the room, and it’s like a Benetton ad. Solange is good people and she fits our vibe.”
The Knowles sisters, who grew up in Houston, have been singing and performing since they could walk.
Their show parents were sometimes tough on them. Matthew Knowles, the patriarch, managed their careers until Beyoncé parted ways with him last summer. Their mother, Tina, has designed all of their costumes since they were little. Solange, who is five years younger than Beyoncé, was classically trained in ballet, jazz, tap and modern dance.
She was a teen when her sister’s group, Destiny’s Child, was hitting its stride. She filled in as a backup dancer on the trio’s international tour. When Destiny’s Child opened for Christina Aguilera in 2000, Solange even sang and danced in the place of Kelly Rowland, who had broken her toe during a costume change.
When Solange was 15, she signed with Columbia Records, and soon released “Solo Star,” an R&B album that dropped off the charts five weeks after its release.
She dabbled in acting, playing Vanessa Williams’ daughter in the 2004 film “Johnson Family Vacation.”
That same year, at age 17, Solange married her high-school boyfriend, Daniel Smith, 19, then a football player at Texas Southern University in Houston. The couple wed in an intimate ceremony in the Bahamas.
The couple had a son, Daniel Julez, eight months later and moved to the Idaho countryside when Smith went to play wide receiver for Boise State University.
Solange continued writing. She wrote three tracks on Kelly Rowland’s first solo album, “Simply Deep,” and co-wrote the 2007 Beyoncé hit “Get Me Bodied.”
That year, Solange confirmed that she and her husband had divorced, and she moved back to Houston and decided to make another album.
She has since been linked to music-video director Alan Ferguson.
On Twitter, she’s written about being a young single mother. Asked by a fan if she regretted it, she said: “Not at all. Learned some monumental life lessons early on that shaped me into who I am.” The couple still co-parent their son, she has said.
Solange released the Motown-influenced “SoL-AngeL & the Hadley Street Dreams” in 2008. The record, released on her father’s label, Music World Entertainment, in conjunction with Geffen Records, was critically acclaimed, but commercially a flop.
But “Solo,” as friends call her, never strived to be a hit machine.
“I just want to make music that makes me feel the same way I feel when I go see my favorite artists,” she said in a 2008 interview with Paper Magazine.
Last fall, Solange moved from LA to Brooklyn, where she’s introduced Beyoncé and Jay-Z to indie rock and Cobble Hill.
For now, she’s cultivating the persona of the down-to-earth regular girl with no secrets.
“Is there anything you are insecure about?” a fan asked her on Twitter.
“Of course!” she responded. “Wish my boobs were perkier and ears were smaller but hey, you work w what you got.”