Sheherazaad
Sheherazaad is an American performer-composer from the San Francisco Bay Area. As a second-generation immigrant and active member of the South Asian diaspora, she draws on Eastern and Western musical traditions to create music that she calls contemporary folk-pop synthesis. In addition to her music, her thoughtful lyricism draws on Hindi and Urdu poetic forms and examines themes of displacement, imagined homelands, the mother tongue, and more.
"I think we’re in a very much in a post-fusion world now, where these categories no longer serve living entities that are really suffering."
Music Inspiration
“My mom was a singer, and apparently, I would emulate her whenever she was holding me.”
Learning Music
“I started out learning Western vocal music...”
Music Idols
“My absolute favorite composers of all time are Arooj Aftab and Agnes Obel.”
Thematic Inspirations
“Broken language. Lost language. Lost mother tongue. Lost ancestral tongue. And the broken ways in which diasporic people speak."
Qasr EP Process
"The process of producing the album was a really drawn out one, and it was spread over some of the years of COVID and before COVID, so kind of different worlds that the album was being produced in, like before and after.
Messages in the Music
“You could say a different angle of the feminine sonic expression is something that I wanted—maybe not necessarily to convey—but something that I wanted to hear.”
Worlds in her Music
“That's why I keep going back to sort of a diasporic soundscape because we're straddling a lot of different worlds in that position, and it all seeps in."
Collaborations
“I've had some painful collaborations, we all have working in this world... and then of course there are really nourishing, really defining collaborative relations that grow you and nourish you in a completely different way and make you feel like you can fly."
Challenges in the Industry
“I fall every day in some way, and sometimes it takes days to get up."
What is "fusion"?
“I hate that word. I don't use it. I think that word doesn't carry any real meaning or weight."
Music Goals
“My goal every day is to really connect with the divine through music."