[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Kousha Navidar: This is all of it. I'm Kusha Navidar in for Allison Stewart. Hey, happy Thursday and thanks for hanging out with us. I'm so glad that you're here. On today's show, we'll hear about the new film Ghost Light, which is in theaters this weekend. We're going to talk about Thai food as a part of our weekly Food for Thought series, and we'll talk about grief with author and social worker Lisa Keefauver. That's the plan. So let's get this started with some music from Alisa Amador.

[MUSIC - Alisa Amador: Heartless Author]

Kousha Navidar: That is Heartless Author from singer-songwriter Alisa Amador's new album, Multitudes or Multitudes, which we'll get to in a second, but in a few moments, we're going to hear a special live performance from her. Amador is a singer-songwriter from Cambridge, Massachusetts, but in 2022, she was pretty close to quitting music, an art form she loved since she was a kid. It was also around this time when Amador had a breakthrough moment in her career. She got the call that she had won the 2022 Tiny Desk Contest, always a sought-after prize for independent, up-and-coming musicians. We're going to hear her perform the song that won her contest soon.

Alisa Amador's new album is called Multitudes. It's out now. Alisa is also playing a show tomorrow night opening for Lake Street Dive at the Stone Pony Summer Stage in Asbury Park. Also, a heads up, look out for Alisa to be announcing her national headlining tour next week. Most immediately, she is here 12 feet in front of me right now in studio to perform for us.

Alisa Amador: The secret is revealed.

[laughter]

Kousha Navidar: Oh, no, live radio. Hi, Alisa.

Alisa Amador: Hi, Kousha.

Kousha Navidar: I'm waving to you. Thank you so much for being here.

Alisa Amador: Thank you so much for having me. It's very surreal to just witness someone talking about me and hiding behind the microphone on the other side. [laughs]

Kousha Navidar: That's a lot of good stuff to hear.

Alisa Amador: It is.

Kousha Navidar: Maybe we can start off with some music. You were going to perform the first song on the album, Extraño.

Alisa Amador: Yes, Extraño. We're going to kind of go on a little mini-album, journey, and the first song on the record is called Extraño, which means strange, but we'll talk more about it after.

[MUSIC - Alisa Amador: Extraño]

Kousha Navidar: Wow. That was Alisa Amador performing her new song, Extraño, from her new album, Multitudes or Multitudes, which is out now. That was beautiful.

Alisa Amador: Thank you.

Kousha Navidar: Thank you so much for playing that. Extraño is such a powerful word in Spanish because-

Alisa Amador: It is.

Kousha Navidar: -it's got this double meaning to it. On one hand, it means strange literally, but then you use it as a conjugation of to miss.

Alisa Amador: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, and I totally was thinking about that while you were singing and when I first learned this song. What are you going at with that sentiment, with that title?

Alisa Amador: I think that that double meaning of yo extraño is like I miss, but it's also a poetic way of saying me the strange one, yo extraño. I think that double meaning, it's so appropriate and poignant for so many people. Anyone who is a child of immigrant parents or who has immigrated themselves or who's transplanted from one part of the country to another to go to school or get a job, or who's a child of divorce and moves between these two different kind of family worlds or who doesn't fit neatly into a gender box. There's so many ways to be in between and to feel like you don't fit.

Kousha Navidar: The first line of that song is a rough translation here, so I might be wrong, but to me, it's like "I miss the words I used to know," is that right?

Alisa Amador: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Can you talk about that?

Alisa Amador: I miss the words I used to know. Spanish is my first language. My mom is Puerto Rican and my dad is Chicano from New Mexico, and they met and started a band and started a family in Boston, Massachusetts. It's a beautiful cultural mix, but it's a pretty confusing identity sometimes because it does not fit neatly into any boxes. I was studying songwriting for the first time in my life during the pandemic because there was this time when we weren't on the road, so I took a class over Zoom in Argentina.

I was really pushing myself to write in Spanish more than in English because Spanish is my first language, but English, obviously, is the language I'm speaking in the day-to-day. It comes more quickly, more easily to write in English, but that doesn't necessarily mean that I don't have something to say in Spanish.

Kousha Navidar: Sure.

Alisa Amador: I was really pushing myself to write in Spanish, and I wrote this song that I'm still proud of now, but I brought it to the group and everyone else in the class from Argentina, and they were like, "Hey, it's beautiful. It's very beautiful, but there's these grammatical issues or temporal issues and you use this verb, and then this verb," and I broke down. I wrote that song after because I felt so mournful of how I just felt like the more time I live in the US, maybe the less I know in Spanish, the fewer words in Spanish that come to me quickly. I sat down and I felt just like, "I don't fit anywhere," and I wrote this song, "I miss the words that I used to know."

Kousha Navidar: I feel that so much of that resonates for me because you're from an immigrant family, grew up in Boston, right?

Alisa Amador: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: I'm from an immigrant family, grew up in Albany, which you just drive I-90 for three hours so we can see each other.

Alisa Amador: It's the same.

Kousha Navidar: Do you feel like that experience is taking on a different shade to the way you incorporate it into your art now than maybe you used to, or do you see an evolution there?

Alisa Amador: Yes. It's so interesting to me how the songs that I write from a place of almost like grief or mourning or feeling lost, then end up becoming this way of celebrating the in-betweenness because I'm acknowledging it, first of all. I'm talking about it at my shows and I'm singing this song to a whole audience of people who feel like they don't fit in in some way or another. Everyone has that experience, especially children of immigrants, and it really is very healing. I don't feel or I don't know if I don't feel any shame at all about not fitting in, but I feel much less shame and I feel much less confused about it now.

It's like, "Oh, we all move through the in-between" and this is something actually to celebrate and to lift up as an American story and as a story of so many people.

Kousha Navidar: Yes, and your story is super interesting because like you mentioned, you grew up playing in your parents' band, Sol y Canto, right? Is the name of it?

Alisa Amador: Yes, Sol y Canto. My mom will be so happy that you said their band name on the air. Sol y Canto, everyone. They're amazing.

Kousha Navidar: Tell me more of it. Tell me why they're amazing. What did you grow up playing? Tell me about that.

Alisa Amador: They're a Latin folk band and my dad plays guitar and writes beautiful songs and my mom is an incredible vocal interpreter and also plays percussion. They toured full-time until my twin brother and I were in high school, and then now they're still touring to this day. They just also do a couple of other things that are also cool. Their music is mostly in Spanish and also doesn't fit neatly into a genre either. It's Latin music, pan-Latin music, as they say. All these different rhythms, all these different folk styles from all these different parts of the Spanish-speaking world. It tells a really huge story over the course of one show.

They have this habit that they formed. I don't know when they came up with this idea, but they translate the lyrics of the songs in Spanish while playing the chords of the song. It's like an instrumental poetry reading of these beautiful lyrics in Spanish. It's a way of trying to bring everyone into the song, whether or not they speak Spanish, and help everyone to feel like, yes, we're here together, we're experiencing this together regardless of whether or not you speak the language.

Kousha Navidar: Do you feel like you took any major lessons? I'm sure you did. I guess the real question-

Alisa Amador: Absolutely.

Kousha Navidar: -is what comes to mind right now when you think about lessons from that time?

Alisa Amador: I think from a very young age, I had a deep understanding of magic. [laughs] Of the magic of a concert and why it must be preserved. It's one of the last gathering places we have. Way back when, we had the market and all the different individual shops where you would go to interact with people for different services and town halls and all these things that are harder to access now or people don't necessarily realize they can access it. Concerts are one of the last remaining gathering places that we have where people are present together and experiencing something together, whether or not they know each other, whether or not they agree.

Even if it's just like for one song or for an hour, I think that that's a deep and important part of everyone's healing and self-care in some way is experiencing art live together. It's really good for you.

Kousha Navidar: Magical.

Alisa Amador: Yes, it is. It's like an honest magic. That's what I called my publishing company, Honest Magic, because it just feels like that. The realness and the vulnerability brings everyone together.

Kousha Navidar: Wow. Folks, we're talking to Alisa Amador, the singer, songwriter, and winner of NPR's 2022 Tiny Desk Contest. She's here right in front of me right now to talk about her new debut album called Multitudes or Multitudes and it's out now. She's also here to perform for us before she plays a show tomorrow night where she's opening for Lake Street Dive at the Stone Pony Summer Stage in Asbury Park. You've got another song for us.

Alisa Amador: I do.

Kousha Navidar: What is it?

Alisa Amador: This one's called I Need to Believe. I should say that when I won NPR Tiny Desk Contest in 2022, I was very deeply in a period of writer's block. It's actually really wonderful that you have someone coming in to talk about grief. The writer's block that I experienced was connected to grief, to losing a close friend very suddenly. I just read last night that grief is love with nowhere to go. What a beautiful way to say it. It's like you just feel so lost. Anyway, I didn't know how to write and I basically relearned how to write songs. This is one of the first songs I was able to finish. It's called I Need to Believe.

A good old, what is it called? Existential crisis song about whether or not you belong. Theme of the day. [laughter] This one, I had to learn to write again even if it was bad, even if I felt like it wasn't good. This is a very literal portrait of a day on tour that was hard and having to tell myself that I need to believe that this is the right path. Here we go. It's going to get loud.

[MUSIC - Alisa Amador: I Need to Believe]

Kousha Navidar: Wow, that was Alisa Amador performing I Need to Believe from her new album Multitudes, which is out now. If you like what you hear right now, she's playing tomorrow night. She's opening for a Lake Street Dive at the Stone Pony Summer Stage in Asbury Park. Alisa, you start that song talking about the state that you were in while you were trying to write it, and you said, "I'm relearning how to write." You use the term insecurity. A musician, being an artist, takes so much courage and strength. I'm sure insecurity is always at the door. How have you learned to deal with it?

Alisa Amador: I would love to ask you the same question as a journalist and as a radio storyteller and question asker. I know it is definitely still a process for me. I think I've just tried to let go of thinking about whether or not it's good and pay closer attention to whether or not I'm honoring the story or whether or not my heart is present with it. Especially with technique as an artist performer, I would rather a performance that's just a tiny bit off or off-key or has a moment with a flub or something where your heart is totally in it than a performance where it's completely technically perfect but has no feeling. How about you?

Kousha Navidar: I think that applies to a lot of it. There's this idea of where your heart is, where the fun is in a conversation. Sometimes live stuff makes it so that you have to go off the beaten path, maybe it's unpolished. I think that's where a lot of the joy is as well. How do you find the joy in the music that you're writing?

Alisa Amador: I think it's always in other people for me, in my friends and my family and my loved ones, and then in the audiences I've gotten to meet while I've been touring in the last couple of years. There have been such incredible audiences. I have gotten to open for Lake Street Dive once before, and it was an utter joy because it just felt like they have an audience that wants to dance and scream and yell, but they also want to listen and cry because that's what Lake Street Dive creates in their albums and in their songwriting. They want to be honest. They also want to dance. I love that combination. I feel the very same way.

Kousha Navidar: That connection that you're talking about, first of all, I'm just so grateful that you asked me what I thought about it. That's such a nice exchange that I rarely get. That connection is absolutely, I think, at the core. If you think about musicians coming up right now, trying to navigate everything, I'm sure that connection is important, but probably tough to find. I'd assume, especially after COVID. What advice do you have for them about how to forge it? What's worked for you?

Alisa Amador: Take care of yourself. Take care of yourself and hold on to what really feeds you. Notice when you feel really nourished by something that you're doing and make sure that that's prioritized. Don't let go of it. Even if it's something that other people might say is not as important. What other people say is not actually what works for you. As an artist, if you're thinking about cultivating an audience, I just feel like being yourself is the secret to life and also to a sustainable career because if you're trying to fit yourself into someone else's mold, or really, it's a systems mold. It's not just one person telling you what to be.

It's a whole toxic system. Let's be real. [laughter] When you're trying to fit yourself to that, I don't think anybody wins because I learned the hard way pre-Tiny Desk. The reason that I was really feeling so broken and I had to let go off music was that I was playing for audiences that did not want to receive my music, and so I just kept trying to change myself and change myself and change myself. It broke me and it never worked. Let me tell you, when you try to be someone else, it can't go for that long.

Kousha Navidar: When you come from a family of immigrants, a lot of your life is that like, "Well, what box can I fit into and how can I conform myself to fit into that box?"

Alisa Amador: Yes, exactly, how can I code-switch right now? Yes, exactly. Especially artists who are more beginning or investigating a full-time career, I just want to remind you all to be good to yourself because the industry, I feel like, for artists, for journalists, for anyone working in any service and communication world is not designed to honor your humanity. You have to be the one noticing how you feel and taking care of you because I certainly want to keep hearing your art, I certainly want to keep hearing your journalism. Let's all take care of ourselves, please. Listen to yourself and be good to yourself.

Kousha Navidar: I would also like to say thank you for that and also I would love to listen to you now. Let me tell you what's going to happen because this is live.

Alisa Amador: Tell me.

Kousha Navidar: I'm going to give you your due. I'm going to say goodbye to you and let you close out with your song. For folks listening, and by the way, we just got a text that says, "When is this amazing singer-songwriter going to perform in New York City, not New Jersey?" We've been talking to Alisa Amador, the singer-songwriter and winner of NPR's 2022 Tiny Desk Contest. Her album Multitudes is out now. She's also performing tomorrow night at The Stone Pony, at Summer Stage in Asbury Park for Lake Street Dive. You're about to announce your headlining tour next week, right?

Alisa Amador: Yes.

Kousha Navidar: Stay tuned for that.

Alisa Amador: Stay tuned. Alisa, that's A-L-I-S-A, Amador, A-M-A-D-O-R. It's just like Lisa with an A in front. alisaamador.com will give you all the answers you need and following me on Spotify, all that stuff, la la la.

Kousha Navidar: You're here to play Milonga Accidental, right?

Alisa Amador: I am. One more existential lullaby to lead us out. I just want to say thank you so much, Kousha, for having me. I'm honored. Thank you, WNYC. This is very cool for me. I'm Alisa Amador and this song is all about embracing your seeming contradictions. I will be in Manhattan on July 11th for a free concert through Carnegie Hall at Madison Square Park.

Kousha Navidar: Hey.

[laughter]

Alisa Amador: It'll be outdoors, so you can bring your doggies.

Kousha Navidar: Love it.

Alisa Amador: Okay, back to being sad. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so honored to be here. I'm Alisa Amador.

[MUSIC- Alisa Amador: Milonga Accidental]

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