East West - The Asian American Lifestyle Magazine

By Dianna Náñez

Mixing prayer calls and Bharat Natyam ankle bells with American pop-folk music just makes sense for singer-songwriter Shaheen Sheik.

Last year on a trip to Europe, fellow Indian music producer DJ Swami questioned her depth as an artist. He told Sheik he liked her music but, “he didn’t hear her.” Sheik insisted that she was a Midwestern girl and as much as she loved fusion music, she was an American rock’n’roll artist. She just couldn’t see how she could mix Indian music with American pop.

Swami challenged her.  She says he told her, “Just because you don’t know how to do it in the way you want to, doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Why don’t you just try?”

A born risk-taker and never one to turn down a challenge, Sheik decided to take a second look at how her artistry and culture could merge. Always proud of her Indian heritage, Sheik looked forward to exploring her musical roots. “If I have an idea in my brain and someone just lightly taps me, it lights a fire in me,” she says.

Growing up, Sheik says she was blessed with a life that allowed her to move effortlessly between her traditional Indian home life and her suburban American surroundings.  She would spend weekdays like any other Midwestern school girl, but on the weekends her family would grow to include neighborhood Indian families. “Every Friday night to Sunday afternoon 15 Indian families would convene at one house. The adults played cards until 5 a.m., while the kids played together. This was my chosen family,” Sheik says.

The weekends also included the traditions of her parents’ homeland, with her father’s love of classical Indian music and her mother’s appreciation for traditional Indian dance.

Sheik’s mother introduced her daughter to Bharat Natyam, a traditional South Indian dance, at a young age. She says her mother had wanted to learn the ancient art form as a girl, but the classic Indian dance that tells of Hindu tradition and epic stories of Gods was considered too scandalous for her to practice. At the delight of her mother and at a mere 7 years old, Sheik quickly took to the classic Indian rhythms and the natural high of performing.

By the time Sheik was college bound, her love for dance had deepened.  She struck a deal with her parents that if she finished her anthropology degree at UC Berkeley a year early, they would support her studying dance full time for the remainder of the time that she would have been in college.  They agreed.

While cultivating this love of dance, Sheik also began writing poetry and quickly was taken by the idea that her prose easily could be transformed into lyrics.  Never mind that she had never written a song or couldn’t play an instrument; Sheik was determined now to write a song. “I don’t ever get stopped by not knowing how to do things. I figure it’s not rocket science.”

Convincing her musician friends to teach her how to play guitar, and with only two chords mastered Sheik began writing and singing her own songs.  She even entered a Billboard magazine contest, sending in a demo of the only three songs that she could bear to share with the world. To her surprise, Sheik won the contest and received a free studio recording session.

“In the studio I realized how much I loved the technology, it was so challenging in a different way than school had ever been, and I thought I could do this professionally,” she says.

Sheik began playing local gigs and decided to take a chance on a career as a musician. But reconciling her dreams with her parents’ traditions was difficult. “They were really, really scared. Their job as good Indian parents was to get their kids educated and married, and they couldn’t understand how I could raise a family if I was playing late-night shows and traveling on tour.”

Still they were supportive, escorting her to barroom shows even when there were only two or three people in the audience. So when Sheik finally recorded her first full-length album she felt she owed it to her dedicated family and to herself to intertwine her heritage with her art. Inspired by artists like Nelly Furtado who successfully blend their culture with contemporary music and spirited by DJ Swami’s challenge to expand her musical horizon, Sheik has wrapped “Rock Candy” with sexy pop tracks like “Here and Now,” which includes a sample of Sheiks own Bharat Natyam ankle bells dancing in a mesmerizing rhythm.

She says the album is “such a sweet combination of American pop music with a worldly feel. I put my spirituality, my feelings of love and trust and ethereal stuff into a Western pop album without turning it into a preachy thing.”

And listening to songs like “Circle,” which effortlessly begins and ends with an Eastern call to prayer, yet is anchored by a perfectly American melody, it is easy to hear this sweet combination.

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