Ximena Sariñana – “Different”
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Here in the States, Ximena Sariñana isn’t really a household name. But in her native Mexico, she’s a star, having graced the pages of Rolling Stone España and other popular Spanish-language magazines. Sariñana got her start at age 11, acting in popular Mexican telenovelas (her father is producer/director Fernando Sariñana and her mother, Carolina Rivera, is a screenwriter). She started playing music, as she puts it, as a hobby, but soon joined forces with her classmates to form Feliz No Cumpleanos (Happy Un-Birthday). Having a knack for songwriting, she soon decided to go solo and write and perform under her own name.
Her first album, Mediocre, was released by Warner Brothers in 2008 and rose to #2 on the Mexican charts. Though Sariñana is bilingual, her debut was recorded in Spanish. She notes that it was important to her to perfect writing songs in Spanish before tackling songwriting in English. Soon after, Sariñana began working on an English-language follow-up. Her eponymous sophomore release was recorded in Mexico City and L.A. and will hit record stores in the U.S. in August.
The young singer/songwriter came through Austin last month and swung by KUT’s Studio 1A to perform some songs from her upcoming release. She says she wrote the song “Different” after reflecting on the cultural differences between the US and Mexico and how her occupation forces her to reconcile the two.
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