Q&A: Ximena Sariñana

Ximena Sariñana has gone from precocious -- acting in films and novelas since childhood -- to prolific -- contributing to movie soundtracks, jamming out with her old jazz band Feliz No Cumpleaños, and surrendering to her emotions like a young Fiona Apple en español on her debut album Mediocre, for which she has received multiple Latin Grammy nods: Artist of the Year, Best Alternative Song ("Normal") and Producer of the Year (along with Soda Stereo collaborator, producer Tweety Gonzalez). The songs on Mediocre (irony noted) have a smokey cabaret feel -- sharp, jazzy, cynical, with a bourbon sting -- but can be equally appreciated crying your heart out over a heap of dirty dishes -- speaking to everyday heartbreak, tapping into the most common of love-related insecurities, and the need to escape from it all. Basically, the heart's inner monologue.

"The album is 100 percent real," says Ximena. "The thing that I wanted the most was to be as honest as I could and not to stop myself from talking about things -- about how I felt. At some point, I felt like I wanted to run away from something, and I was gonna talk about it. And at some point, I felt that I was afraid of being forgotten, and I was gonna talk about it. It's kind of like an experiment. It wasn't all something that I was going through at the time, but it was something that had struck me as interesting. Or something I wanted to put it out in the open. I thought that, the more honest you are, the stronger you are, because there's nothing hiding, there's nothing in the background that people don't know. The more you show, the stronger you are. At least, that's what I thought at the time." Here,  Ximena speaks on becoming an accidental producer, finding her voice, shooting in Iceland and much more.

[Click the "Continue Reading..." link to listen to a playlist featuring the music discussed in this post.]

Rhapsody: You inhabit two different realms on Mediocre – as the artist and as a producer. And you've been nominated for both, Artist of the Year and Producer of the Year, along with producer Tweety Gonzalez.
Ximena: I don't really consider myself a producer. ... I was very involved in the process, and I guess, I gave a lot of ideas about how I wanted the music to sound. I really didn't ask for the producer credit, but Tweety thought that it was fair since we worked together a lot. I didn't really mean to be a producer.

I actually met Tweety through MySpace – I didnt really know him for working with Soda Stereo because I wasn't such a huge fan of Soda Stereo. He had this band with his ex-wife called Acida – and I really really enjoyed that band. I heard that he was the producer of the band, and I was thinking that I was persuing that kind of sound. So, I wrote to him. I looked for him on MySpace and I sent him a message – and he listened to my music and he really, really liked it before I had a record deal or anything. And we really wanted to work together but we really didn't know how. We didn't know if we were going to do a record of my songs, or if we were gonna do a jazz album. And then, slowly things started to fall into place. I learned a lot about myself, especially. He's a great great friend. He kind of let me be and he forced me into making decisions and thinking about stuff that I wouldn't have thought of if I had been with a more controlling producer. So, he kinda helped me and led me into coproducing with him. He pushed me more than what I was planning to give, I think.

I also met [Mediocre producer Juan Campodonico] on the Internet – I wrote him. It was interesting because he saw lots of clips of me singing jazz – and he's a big jazz fan. He wanted to explore that side of me as an interpreter. He produced the song that the record company didn't really like and I really liked the song, which was "Normal." I sent it to him without the company knowing. And that was the first single -- and that's the song that got nominated for the Best Latin Alternative Song.

You've been working on music in many different fashions for a very long time – themesongs for novelas, movie soundtracks, your band Feliz No Cumpleaños. So, I wanted to know, when did you discover that voice that you have on Mediocre?
I think it's just the period of evolution that I'm in. Everything that I did in the past helped me to have that style and that voice. I listen to a lot of music, a lot of jazz, because my dad was a big fan. And when I was 16, when I started studying music in a more formal way, I came across Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and tons of bossa nova and a little bit of other musical styles – not just pop-rock. When I was studying jazz, I felt the need to perform it live. I started going to small jazz clubs, jam sessions at this club on Tuesdays in Mexico. I started getting gigs, and asking musicians that I admired to play with me. I did that for, like, two years. With Feliz No Cumpleaños, the band was all into jazz. It was fun, because we were seven in the band and everyone had different tastes. One of them liked reggae and one of them liked punk ... To me, it's just a combination of everything.

The videos for "Vidas Paralelas" and "Normal" were both shot in Iceland. Why did you choose that location?
It actually wasn't my idea. It was the director's idea. He's a friend of mine. It was really just something that came out of nowhere. He just wrote to me and said, "What do you think about going to Iceland to do the videos?" And I said, "Hey, why not?" I really wanted to go to Iceland and I love traveling. It was just him, me and the photographer – and we rented a car and we slept in the house of a guy that lent us the place so that we could crash. We ate in these really horrible places – it was very low budget. We kind of spent almost the whole budget on going to Iceland. It was in November. The sun would be coming up at 10 and go down at 4. It was like 1 degree Celsius, -1. Very, very cold. The weather is very weird. It changes a lot all the time. It would be raining and suddenly, like two minutes later, there'll be sun, then it will be snowing, then it will be very windy, then the sun comes out again. All that happens in about 30 minutes, more or less. It's very, very weird.

You've mentioned Björk as one of your influences – did that have anything to do with his decision or bring any special meaning to the trip at all?
No .... it gave special meaning because the first night I was there by myself, and the director and the photographer hadn't arrived yet. It was the only Saturday I was going to be in Iceland, so I decided I was going to go out by myself. So, I went to this bar where Björk filmed her "Triumph of a Heart" video – and just went there and drank a whiskey and went home. It was kind of funny, just wanting to be there for the fun of it.

You're dating Omar Rodríguez-López from the Mars Volta. That's a lot of art and talent in one relationship. Just on a creative level, what has he brought to your music and what have you brought to his? Do you ever bounce ideas off each other?
He's definitely influenced me a lot musically. He's showed me way more music than I know. Now I know more than what I used to. He introduced me to a lot of '70s bands. The first time we hungout, he brought me like 20 albums and I still haven't been able to get through all of them. I really admire him, so I hope we get to work together. Our sounds are really different, but we have a pretty similar train of thought, approach to music.

Has working as an actress helped you when you're writing these songs – to kind of look at it from outside of yourself? Does your acting affect your singing and vice versa?
They definitely compliment each other. Especially because, in the end, when you're dealing with any kind of art, you learn how to play with your emotions. You learn how to get in touch with them, bring them up, or tone them up, depending on what you need as an actress. And that really helps with music as well. To be an actress, you need a lot of reflection. Being very reflective has really helped my music, because you have more stuff to talk about. When it comes to interpreting a song, that isn't yours, when it comes to performing, it helps a lot to have the ability to have that point of intersection with the character in the song, with you and the character of the song, so that you can make it more personal. There's two movies that I filmed in 2006 that are coming out soon. One of them is called El Brassier de Ema and the other one is called Enemigos Íntimos – that was at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival. El Brassier, it's more of a secondary character. But in Enemigos Íntimos, I play a girl with a brain tumor and what she goes through.

And taking on a character like that, is that reflecting itself at all in your music?
I think it did – kind of. It gave me other things to think about and to talk about. It affects everything that you do.

You chose to do this first album in Spanish, but you've said that you felt more comfortable expressing your feelings in English?
At first, I was. I learned English before Spanish – I was born in Mexico, but when I was six months old, they took me to L.A. So we lived in L.A. for five years. And then I went to British school all my life – so all my essays and all our lessons were in English. So at some point, I was better at everything in English – and then when I started my band with Feliz No Cumpleaños – none of them spoke English. So I was forced to write in Spanish and in the end, I became more fond of Spanish. I've been trying to write the lyrics in English and I think they're not as interesting as my Spanish. Now, I think the challenge will be to go back to English.

Further Reading:
Q&A: Plastilina Mosh [PLAY]

Further Listening:
Latin Grammys '08 playlist