Features

Woman At Work: Ximena Sarinana

Born to prominent parents in Mexico’s film industry, Ximena Sariñana made waves as a child actor before turning to music, eventually winning a scholarship to Berklee School of Music’s five-week summer performance program when she was still a teenager. By the time she recorded Mediocre, her technicolor alt-pop en español debut, she was already garnering comparisons to Norah Jones and headlining New York’s 2008 Latin Alternative Music Conference. Were American audiences ready for her?

“My label thought so,” she says today. “Warner U.S. told me my music could appeal to a larger audience in America, so they suggested maybe doing a record in English. And I thought it was a good idea. I like a challenge, and I knew it was gonna be challenging just to get out of my comfort zone and work in another country, with other people and in another language. I decided to go for it.”

Tracked in Los Angeles, her eponymous American debut was co-produced with Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Sia Furler), Mexican up-and-comer Natalia Lafourcade and TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek. The songs cover an eclectic range of influences from punk to synth-pop to Beatles-esque psychedelia—all of it anchored by Sariñana’s pitch-perfect vocals and mind-expanding, often madcap lyrics.

“Sometimes I get fed up with my own complexity!” she laughs, citing the Sitek-produced rocker “Shine Down” as an example. “That song basically talks about this feeling you get when you’re trying to keep up with someone who is demanding or who is on a very straight path. You’re trying to catch up and be as good as that person is, [yet] you feel like you can never be there.”

With guest appearances by Rancid’s Tim Armstrong (who co-wrote the upbeat single “Different”) and The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (who plays bass on the dreamy piano ballad “Tu Y Yo”), Sariñana’s latest is a group effort on one level, but there’s no question who’s in charge.

“‘Different’ was sort of an apology letter to everyone I worked with on the album,” she quips. “It’s just the way I am. Mexicans are different, and my culture is very different from this one; but in the end, you realize that we’re all human beings and we all come from the same place. We all love, we all laugh, we all fight, we all die. It’s just about coming to terms with that.”