Album Notes

Shireen Amini is a 22-year-old singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from the outskirts of San Francisco whose diverse background channels through her voice and her music to create a powerful fusion of Rhythm and Blues with a simultaneously Folk, Afro-Latin, and World music sensibility. Vocally, she is a cross between Tracy Chapman, Madonna, Sheryl Crow, and Gloria Estefan. Musically, she is all over the place. A Latin tumbao underlies the folk-rock texture of her songs elaborated by any combination of reggae, hip hop, or Afro-Latin rhythms. Apart from acoustic guitar and keyboards, Shireen’s specialty instrument is the Afro-Peruvian box drum called a cajón, an instrument she learned to play during her four-month stay in Cusco, Perú. She also experiments with other Latin percussion such as Afro-Cuban and Brazilian. Her folk and hip hop-inspired lyrics are anywhere from witty to poetic, humorous to raw and vulnerable. They reflect a sincere and inquisitive mind with literal and metaphorical references to her own life experiences written in a way that listeners can closely relate.

Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico and raised in California by her Puerto Rican mother and Iranian father, Shireen began her musical training in the Western classical tradition, but quickly took interest in more popular genres like jazz and blues as well as traditional sounds of her own mixed heritage. Her passion for songwriting from an early age and interest in her Middle Eastern and Latin roots lead her to study Ethnomusicology at UCLA, where she focused particularly on Afro-Latin percussion but absorbed sounds from all over the world. Through her knowledge and growth in and outside of UCLA, she has cultivated a songwriting style that is both mature and innovative.