Artist Simone Green’s ‘Black Queen’ Moment Is Rooted in Love, Heritage and Her Journey as a Breast Cancer Survivor (Interview)

Inspired by Ghana and her own life experiences, the two-time breast cancer survivor hopes her music reminds Black women that “they are royal.”

As she continues to celebrate the success of her album “Black Queen,” singer-songwriter Simone Green has a story to share and a legacy she wants to leave behind.

“Black Queen” consists of six tracks, including the title track, which Green began writing last fall. She was inspired to title the project after her winter trip to Ghana.

“I felt like a Black queen,” she said about the trip. “I’m feeling in control of myself, in control of my health, my mind, my body, and just this entire process has come together at the perfect time in my life. This is my Black queen moment.”

Listen to the full interview here:

She encourages everyone with African ancestry to visit the motherland at some point in their lives. She said she learned about Africa growing up, but visiting was a different experience.

“It’s sobering to think that the Europeans came in and started stealing the young children and kidnapping them, and the Ghanaian people basically said, ‘No, if you want to live in harmony with us, you can no longer do that.’”

Green said she learned that, because the Europeans wanted to remain along the coast, they eventually began moving inland.

“They went further inland and started stealing people and putting the tribes against each other and buying their slaves and their prisoners and making them slaves,” she said. “So learning so much about the journey and how they got to the coast and the slave castles, it just, it’s an unbelievable story. It was very sobering and really necessary to learn a lot of that history from that vantage point.”

The trip to Africa was an inspiration for the latest project, but Green also pulls from different aspects of her life.

A song that stands out regarding that human connection is “Married to My Music,” in which Green talks about finding balance in life with her family, job and growing music career.

“‘Married to My Music’ is kind of about my relationship and where I am right now, being able to do the travel and the tours and move around all the cities, but to make sure that the people I love know that I’m still there.”

Challenges arise in life, but Green makes it clear that “Ohh Wee” is directly about her husband and their 10 years of Black love and wedding bliss.

Download “Black Queen” here.

Strength, love and resilience are themes displayed through Green’s latest music project, “Black Queen,” and they are qualities she herself possesses as a two-time breast cancer survivor.

2026 marks 10 years since Green’s original diagnosis, and she credits early detection as the key to her survival.

“All women over 40, if you love a woman over 40, if you are friends with a woman over 40, encourage her to get her mammogram every single year because it will definitely save her life or someone else’s,” Green said.

Green shared that she did not have a history of breast cancer in her family, but because of early detection, the cancer was caught before it metastasized.

She underwent 30 rounds of radiation the first time, with her last round taking place on Halloween 2016. But the cancer came back, and Green made the decision to undergo a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.

“You need to know what kind of health issues they [family] have to see if you’re potentially at risk, to potentially see if you have the BRCA gene, which is the gene that carries the breast cancer in a lot of patients,” Green said.

While emphasizing the importance of yearly exams, Green acknowledges that finances and related issues bar a number of women from being able to get the exams.

She praised advocacy groups and said she is starting one herself to help “so many women, especially women of color who are not getting the health care that they need and anything that I can do to bridge that gap, I will do.”

Green tells a story with her music, but she also leaves things behind, furthering her legacy.

“I wrote this really as a love letter to myself as a way to express myself,” she said.

When it comes to her music and what she hopes Black women, in particular, take away, Green wants them “to know and remember that they are royal. Everything we touch comes from us. Everything we touch is gold. And to just remember that even though the world is trying to erase us in so many instances and the history and what we bring to the table, you really remember that you are sovereign.”