by Sherif Awad
-I was born in Sicily, Catania, Italy. My mother is from Naples and my father from Western Sicily. I lived in a small town on a hill with my family and my brother. He was the one in family who approached music and involved me in playing and singing. In my adolescence, I strongly started to feel attracted really to arts and entertainment, and so I was always in every school show involving music and acting. After my graduation in ordinary school I started attending a musical academy and I started to plan live shows with my band in pubs and events. From that moment on music has been a fundamental part of my life and it is still now.
– My model in cinema was always Leonardo DiCaprio and I grew up with the music of Whitney Houston, Brian McKnight and other R’N’B singers, mostly black music. When I was I teenager, I really started to appreciate a lot of boy bands since I loved Acappella singing, so I was really inspired by Backstreet Boys, Westlife, Boyzone, Five, East 17, Nsync, Take That, Boyz II Men and others. But my kings of music were represented from Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. I fell in love with dancing with MJ since It wasn’t really one of my attitudes.
– I started to write my own music lately, since I was always involved in others’ projects and got no time to care about my personal purposes. I think that music creation exploded in me after all my experiences that have been matured in my soul and wanted to break out with my voice. All of my former studies contributed to create the artist that I’m now: piano, guitar, singing, musical, harmonies and so on. Now everything about art I ever studied composed a puzzle of music composition about me.
-I’m an artist for myself. Maybe it could be sound selfish but I decided to not accept roles in musicals or other show where I don’t feel completely represented because I prefer dedicating myself into my music, since it makes me feel fine maybe better. Be worldwide famous? Maybe one day. When that day comes, I will be glad because I’ll be able to get into my own music world a lot of people that maybe can move, can feel, can share my own feelings and I will feel “understood”.
– The challenges that I’m facing now is caring about music and caring about social image. It’ s really hard being present in every social network with always interesting contents, since this gets time to music creation, so maybe once a musician had only to compose, now an artist must be a marketing strategist too.
– In my country art industry is really bounded to TV: music labels take artist from talent shows since they can spare on promotions and launch a well-packed product on the market, if it works then they earn, if it doesn’t they didn’t invest anything.
– I’m really selective on offered works. I choose only the ones that are really suitable to my world as an artist. I always do my best if I accept a job and I bound it deeply to my career and my path. If it is a music job I try to understand the audience destination and what will be the best message for them then I reach my piano and let my soul talk.
– I see a lot of freedom in digital streaming but freedom has always 2 faces: it is simpler for artist to be known or to be famous but a lot of artists without art or with wrong messages can be widespread too so it’s hard to image how to orchestrate this correct stream since art is always subjective and it could be contained in objective way but who can say what is objective in this case? So only a culture and study will give us the answer in the future.
– My private life is really bounded to professional practice since my studio is in first floor of my house. When I’m inspired by a movie or a situation I can run in my studio and start to put that inspiration in a song or in a drama. When I’m disappointed in my studio after several hours of hard work I can go upstairs and hug my beloved ones. So I think that I can’t distinguish my private life from professional life also because music is one of the family.
– My current project is to find a stable label who embraces my whole music project and not jumping from label to another since we don’t agree on some aspects. In the future, I keep on searching collaboration and featuring with other artists also because I think that nowadays share different slices of audience between artists is the best method to be known and make our music really widespread.
