AMERICANA WITH SICILIAN SERENADES

AMERICAN FOLK FOR IMMIGRANTS.

A singer-songwriter who considers herself an activist and messenger of the diaspora with her voice and guitar. She calls her music American folk for immigrants and smoothly switches from Sicilian dialect to English. It is intended for anyone who has ever felt like they don’t belong anywhere and were considered a foreigner at home. The 26-year-old folk singer actually indicates what Generation Z in today’s Trumpian America is most troubled by: the loss of identity.
“I spent my entire youth, wanting to fit in with my classmates, needing to be a “super American.” Until I realized that it was more or less impossible for a child of immigrants. "So I stopped trying and started to get rid of the outdated archetype of what it means to be an American through music," said the daughter of an Egyptian and a Romanian with Italian roots, who was born in New York and now lives in Houston, at the beginning of her career. So it's no coincidence that we hear Tex-Mex with mariachi trumpeters on her latest album Roses and Basil. However, let's take it as a fragment of a fresh mosaic of Americana, Mediterranean, Latin and Sicilian folk songs, especially serenades. She came to them, as is customary for her peers: on the Internet. She was inspired by the iconic Sicilian singer Rosa Balistreri, who stood up to difficult fate, poverty and suffering in the 1970s by singing proletarian ballads. In order to be able to sing them and share them with the world in English translations, Amanda Pascali went to Palermo to study. And then, in addition to her activist attitude, she discovered for herself the possibility of joining some kind of musical space: she created her own, where she can be whoever she wants without any apologies and devote herself to the most important thing: Singing and telling stories.
The punk rocker met her husband, the brilliant multi-instrumentalist Addison Freeman, at the age of eighteen at a conference on American folk. Then she met Paul Stookey from the legendary trio Peter, Paul and Mary, and it was then that she realized that folk is actually punk rock with an acoustic guitar, so it probably doesn't need explaining why Amanda Pascali is sometimes nicknamed "the young, female Bob Dylan from Italy".