Ximena Sarinana

When Mexican vocalist Ximena Sariñana released her debut solo album, Mediocre, in 2008, Rolling Stone gave it four stars and praised it as "one of the strongest debuts from a female singer-songwriter since Norah Jones' Come Away With Me." Recording the Spanish-language album was a natural step for Sariñana, who had risen to fame in her homeland as a child actress and had fronted a successful indie band for four years. "In Mexico, people believed in me as an artist," says the fully bilingual 25-year-old. So when she began thinking about recording an album in English she was confronted with a tough decision: "Either stay in my country, where everyone knows who I am, or start from scratch and convince people that I'm worth it." She chose the latter.



The result is a collection of songs that showcase her deep, striking voice, smart, thoughtful lyrics and offbeat personality. "I think of albums as Polaroid pictures of who I was at that given moment," says Sariñana. "All the songs are a bit dark. They capture a sort of general doom that I try to compensate with humor," she says. The lead single, "Different," opens with a playful whistle but is really an apology to listeners "about maybe not expressing myself clearly because of my different nationality," while "Bringing Us Down" was inspired by the poem "Candles" by Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy and deals with growing older and looking back at the fading past. The album not only reflects Sariñana's wise-beyond-her years demeanor, but also the kind of sonic growth and experimentation expected from a risk-taker.