After three Grammy nods in 2008 for her Spanish alt-pop debut, singer-songwriter Ximena Sarinana is ready to win over U.S. indie fans with her first English album.
Photographed by Jeff Lipsky
Photo: Clasos/zumapress.com
Her album
After three Grammy nods in 2008 for her Spanish alt-pop debut, singer-songwriter Ximena Sariñana is ready to win over U.S. indie fans with her first English album.___
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Mexican indie singer-songwriter Ximena Sariñana (pronounced heh-MEN-a sa-rin-YAH-na) rarely gets stage fright, a perk of growing up as a child actress. "I just roll with it," she says of performing.
Born to a director father and screenwriter mother, the now-25-year-old was in her first movie at age four, when she was featured in her dad's graduate project at UCLA. "To me, my childhood was normal," she says. "I didn't know I was in an artistic world. My parents took me to concerts, operas, and the ballet, and they were always listening to music—everything from Tracy Chapman and Paul Simon to jazz and classical."
When she was five, Ximena's family moved from Los Angeles back to their native Mexico, where she continued to star in films and telenovelas. "I loved acting," the bilingual performer says. "It was immediate. I wanted to do it all the time." By age fifteen, though, Ximena's obsession had shifted to bands like Radiohead and singer-songwriters like Fiona Apple and Bjrk. "I realized that you can author your own music," she says. "That opened my mind to wanting to study it, to try to dig in deeper. I found a specialized school, and as soon as I started classes and met other people who were serious about making music, I got completely hooked, and it became my life."
While at school, she formed a band, Feliz No Cumpleaños (Happy Un-Birthday), which she describes as "experimental—seven members trying out every single genre." At one of their shows in 2006, a manager approached nineteen-year-old Ximena about putting together some solo tracks. Her demos were circulated, and she quickly got a record deal in Mexico. Ximena's first Spanish-language album, Mediocre, came out in 2008 and was an immediate hit, debuting at number one. The songs were poppy with a smooth vocal overlay (think Sia meets Best Coast—or a caffeinated Norah Jones). In 2009, Warner Brothers in the U.S. contacted her about making an English-language album. "It sounded like a great challenge to me," she says.
For her American debut, Ximena relocated to California to work with producers Dave Sitek (Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen). "In L.A., recording the album was my only priority," she remembers. "It was a bit frightening, like, Wow. I don't know anybody here. It was a very intense moment in my life—and the record reflects that." Indeed, her self-titled album, out now, captures a performer stepping onto an entirely new stage and, fearlessly, rolling with it.
