Focused Wandering

Sonia Kreitzer, the Syracuse, N.Y. native more widely known as Doe Paoro—a name inspired by a Maori creation myth about the first woman—doesn’t seem to ever settle down. Besides a recent move to Los Angeles from Brooklyn, the singer-songwriter has spent many months abroad, exploring and studying in various countries. “The sensory experience of traveling and being exposed to different landscapes, colors, music—everything—allows me to think in new ways,” she says. While traveling through India, Doe ended up in the city of Dharamsala, the adopted home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. There, she joined a conservatory dedicated to the art of Tibetan opera, called lhamo, a centuries-old tradition that includes elongated lines of challenging vocal melodies in scales not frequently used in Western music. Doe’s music integrates this style with modern R&B, soul and pop to create something uniquely her own. “We tapped into an organic nature sound that meets the reality of the kind of electronic world that we live in,” she says. Her sophomore album, an engagingly original ode to accepting the past while living in the present and keeping an eye on he future, is aptly titled After.