Autodidactic Genre-Bender Sevdaliza Writes A Letter To Herself On New Album 'Shabrang'
Sevdaliza has lived anything but an ordinary life. She was born in Tehran, Iran, but fled with her family as refugees to the Netherlands when she was young. She began playing basketball, leaving home as a teenager on a scholarship, and ending up on the Dutch National team. She has a masters degree in communications, and taught herself music production, singing and songwriting.
Sevdaliza started releasing her own music in 2014. She dropped two EPs in 2015, The Suspended Kid and Children of Silk, and released her debut album, ISON, two years later. Since then, she’s amassed over half a million listeners on Spotify, received praise from Billie Eilish, and to top it all off, walked at Paris Fashion Week as the star model of the Y/ Project show. Needless to say, Sevdaliza has worn many hats.
In honour of the release of her sophomore album Shabrang, Sevdaliza spoke with L'Officiel about being independent, holistic living, and learning to trust in love and life again.
What have you been up to you during quarantine?
I think, like most people, it was divided between trying to get a hold on what was happening in the world, followed by layers of business, personal life and reflection. I was one of those people who lost a lot of work during quarantine, because I was supposed to go on tour, so I had a lot of time open up.
I wouldn't say I've done work that has been, like, mind-blowingly revolutionary. It was just getting in touch with not being on the road constantly, and also learning how to deal with the state of the world and a pandemic that laid bare a lot of other systemic problems our world is rooted in. I was more an observer than actually doing a lot of things.
Have you felt creative during this time or the pressure to be creative?
Perhaps in the first few weeks, because [I had] no idea how long the period was going to last and what was possible and what was not. For everybody, it was a very unstable period. I think at this time in the U.S., it's definitely still different than it is in Europe, where we are almost back to functioning regularly on a daily basis. But yeah, I definitely felt the pressure in the beginning, but then it kind of died down.
What is your creative process and has it changed since you first got started with music?
My creative process is based on improvisation. A lot of it is very intrinsic and intuitive. I see that in almost all aspects of my life: the way I create a piece of music and also the way I prepare dinner, a lot of times I go into the kitchen and I don't know what I'm going to do and then I end up with a meal. I also really like collaborating. I really like working with someone else, whether that’s in the visual aspects of creativity or music-wise. I think it's healthy and natural for human beings to pair up, so I really enjoy working with others.
Can you talk a little bit about your music background and how you got into it?
I don't have a music background. I'm an autodidact; I taught myself production, songwriting and singing, and then I slowly started to gravitate toward creating music. It was at a later stage in my life. At first, I was on the road to having a university degree and being a professional athlete, but I decided that was not the life I had envisioned for myself. I had the idea that I might be able to do something more creative, and that little spark just blew up. It abducted me and took me with it. Suddenly I was reading music and then I started writing and singing. And from there, I developed this world that I have now.
Tell us more about your new album, Shabrang.
This is my sophomore album, and to me, it's a kind of letter that I wrote to myself. It is my own holy grail. I had to write and record this album in order to regain my trust and belief in life and in love. I've always felt like an observer, and I think that with this album I'm materialising my observations of life and love in a particular period of my life — the past few years have been a rollercoaster ride.
With this record, I also hope that it will bring light and hope to the people listening to it. My first record was kind of like a very long therapy session, and this is more of a jump toward conveying the light that I found in those first few years and trying to go back to it.
Tell us about your fashion experience — you walked in Paris Fashion Week last year.
Fashion and even things like acting are worlds that have been kept away from marginalised people, and I am really excited about all the recent developments in these two worlds because it allows me to realise my dream of walking on a runway at Paris Fashion Week. I can envision myself designing. I can envision myself being a part of a movie, whether that's acting or directing. I can envision myself in all of these creative fields where I feel like, a few years ago, the people I'd been involved with were very one-dimensional. Not the people themselves, but what they were supposed to represent.
Now is the first time that I actually see it as not one-dimensional anymore; there are a lot of fluid characters that are not just a regular size or just a plus size. We can be multiple things now, walking down the runway or directing or acting. That opens up the world to real human beings, and that is very exciting to me. I would say I haven't been involved in fashion and film as much as I want to, but it was definitely an amazing start to walk [for Y/Project] in 2019.
What inspires you? Where do you get your inspiration from?
I have a very rich imagination — just within myself, I have a lot of inspiration. I don't really have creative blocks unless I'm worn out, which is quite normal. But if I'm just in a regular place going about my daily life, then I always have ideas. I think my ideas start to live as soon as I have someone in my life that believes in or talks to me about them. Even now, as I'm conceptualising these words, I'm taking creative concepts that have never been talked about, but your question triggers my mind to be creative about the answers I give. That's how I function with creativity in itself.
I think I have — and I think that's the female component in all human beings — the creativity in my belly and everything is inside of me, but the act of sharing it with other human beings makes it real. Then it starts to live, and live outside of itself, and that's why I touched on the subject of collaboration earlier. I find a person, or I share with someone, and then it becomes real and I start to dream about it.
I also get excited by seeing other people be amazing in their own craft. I can feel super inspired if my partner is painting and I just sit in his studio to watch him. I'd feel like I want to compose a piece of music, whereas just 30 minutes before when we were watching Netflix, I wouldn't. Other people inspire me when they do what they're good at, and it doesn't need to be something artistic.
You're interested in holistic living. Can you talk a little about that?
In terms of holistic living, it's been a process I developed over the course of these intense years. You start to see yourself as the main stable factor in your life, especially if you're traveling around as much as I do. Your own being becomes the thing you have to keep stable, and that's where the holistic part comes in.
For me, holistic living is trying to be as aware of yourself as possible, and how you, as a being, move through this continuum of time and space. Along the way, you come into contact with pieces of experience that could either become knowledge or a problem to find a solution for.
For instance, I suffered severe burns on my legs not too long ago. I did a deep dive into what actually happens to the skin and why it functions the way it does. That adds another layer to my holistic knowledge that I would never have researched if I didn't go through it.
I think the life I have, which is very privileged right now, allows me to see and to experience things that others might not. I get to travel the world, I get to see how people live and how they function, whether that's ecosystems or cultures or systematic oppression. You get this insight into all these subjects, and I think that's where my interest in holistic living stems from.
What do you want people to know about you or your music that they might not know already?
In this day and age, I want people, and especially independent artists, to feel empowered by my story. There are a lot of artists out there, and I don't blame them, that have this entire business structure behind them. I don't. I am fully independent and I'm still doing it. I'm still living the dream that I had envisioned when I started out. That story might be able to empower others to pursue what they really feel.
I don't know if they don't know that about me, but I do think being an entrepreneur and an artist is not easy. I think a lot of people don't really know what it's like to run a business and create the product you're running the business for. That creates a lot of problems because artists don't know what they're getting into when they start creating music. In the future, I would really like to help people with that as well.
For instance, I got a question from someone asking, "Do you know any good managers?" And I replied, there's a saying in Buddhism, it's about greed: if you want something really bad, you don't see that it's in front of you. I think, personally, that you should look around your own environment to find the people you're going to work with. There's not going to be the perfect manager for you from across the world, because the people you want to work and collaborate with should understand who you are. The pandemic definitely laid bare the fact that a lot of people don't understand each other. That's something people might not know about me — I'm pretty outspoken on all these subjects, but I never felt comfortable enough to talk about them. I guess this year might just change that.
What's next for you?
I think living in a balanced way; I've never been able to do that, and I think now might be the time.
