Alisa Amador: Multigenre Spellbinder

Or, How this Latina with a gorgeous voice and inquiring mind "stopped caring about labels and honed my 'Boston Boricua Chicana emotional crybaby funky jazz folk.'"

The first time I saw Alisa Amador perform was two years ago at Joe’s Pub, one of Manhattan’s top smaller music venues. Amador was not the evening’s featured artist, but one of three female singer/songwriters who shared the stage. I doubt that she got to sing a half-dozen songs by herself. But that was all it took for her to delight and excite her audience; there was no doubt in my mind that Amador was a performer who was going nowhere but straight up.

Perhaps 10 months ago, I saw Amador solo at the East Village club Berlin NYC, which she packed. She had just released, or was about to release, her first full-length album, Multitudes. I was obliged to leave before Amador finished her set, and she and her trio—drums, electric bass and the leader on her hollow-body Ibanez electric guitar—were so good that I had to forcibly propel myself out of the room and onto the F train.

Amador didn’t waste a minute of her stage time. At one point, pausing to retune her guitar (a heavy hitter with her picking/strumming hand, Amador needs to retune every three or so songs), she burst, evidently quite impromptu, into a dazzling display of scat-singing. It was the first time I’ve ever seen a singer get a round of applause for tuning her guitar. Amador’s scat-singing, I’ll note, is to marvel at. She’s as good a jazz singer as she is a rock belter as she is the leader of a funk band as she is a folk balladeer. While she’s learned to embrace her diversity, it can still drive her nuts. “I don’t really know what genre my music is,” she said at Berlin NYC, “so if you know, could you let me know at the merch table?”

Amador, who turned 28 last April, is a Latina whose music is fully bilingual. On Multitudes (she borrowed the title from one of her favorite lines of poetry, Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes”), six songs are in English and six in Spanish. Amador’s parents are native Spanish speakers. Her mother is from Puerto Rico, her father from a Spanish-speaking portion of New Mexico. When Alisa and her twin brother, Zia, were growing up, their parents insisted that everyone speak only Spanish at home. It was important to Rosi and Brian Amador that their kids retained close ties to Latin culture, and could communicate with members of their extended family, some of whom don’t speak English.

For decades, Rosi and Brian have led the Latin folk-music band Sol y Canto, which has released five albums since 1993. In keeping with the family’s multiple incongruities, Sol y Canto is based in Boston. The band has always toured extensively, and the kids went along. “When Zia and I were young,” Amador wrote in a 2022 guest column for the Boston Globe, “we spent endless hours squeezed into the back of the minivan, among guitar and percussion cases, or hiding behind the velvet curtains of music venues across the country.” Somehow, Alisa managed to get a first-class education, graduating from Bates College in 2018.

“Together,” from Amador’s 2021 EP, Narratives, performed here with her two earliest collaborators, her parents, Rosi and Brian Amador, with whom Alisa began performing when she was 4 in their Latin folk band Sol y Canto.

While nobody can deny the benefits of a multicultural youth, Amador was not very old—seven or eight, she says—when she begin to wonder where, if anywhere, she fit in. “When we’d go to Puerto Rico, I was ‘la Americana,’” she wrote in her Globe essay. “When we visited my father’s family in New Mexico, I was the city girl from the Northeast. Whenever I met someone, they’d often say something along the lines of ‘You’re not a typical Bostonian.’ It was code for ‘You don’t fit in here.’

“My Spanish has accents from all the places my parents are from and more,” Amador told a Globe reporter earlier this year. “Every time I speak Spanish, I face commentary about my accent. It can feel ostracizing.” If Amador has a personal mission, I would characterize it as learning how to live with so many identities, how to shape oneself into a jigsaw puzzle all of whose pieces fit together. She has never shied away from the challenge. In 2022, she won National Public Radio’s Tiny Desk Contest, which annually draws thousands of contestants, with her song “Milonga accidental,” the first Spanish-language song to win the award. Acing the Tiny Desk Contest is an accomplishment that Amador shares with artists as gifted and promising as the rocker and boygenius member Julien Baker and the New Orleans-based funk/soul/spoken-word outfit Tank and the Bangas.

Milonga is a musical genre native to Uruguay and Argentina (where Amador’s grandfather comes from). “Accidental” means the same thing in Spanish that it does in English. “Milonga accidental” means, literally, “a milonga stumbled across.” The song is about precisely the challenge that Amador has made her life’s, and music’s, mission. “It’s about yearning to fit neatly under one label but failing again and again,” says Amador, “and ultimately embracing your contradictions, celebrating who you are, and making a home within yourself.” “Cuando sentiré mi hogar en mi voz?” she asks in the song: “When will I feel at home in my voice?” Her characterization of the song as an expression of victory, in other words, is not quite accurate. "Milonga accidental” is more about undergoing struggle than overcoming it.

There is only one place where Amador does not feel in conflict with herself. “Whenever I’m onstage, performing, I’m just me. Those boxes defining who I’m supposed to be—none of which I fit into—disappear.”

A lot of other things happen when Amador takes the stage. Hers is a voice that is glorious without making a spectacle of itself. However hard she has worked on her vocal chops, Amador was born with a splendid, God-given gift. I spoke last week to Tyler Chester, who co-produced Multitudes, and he said, “Alisa never and I mean NEVER sang an out-of-tune note. I’ve recorded some really great singers and I’m not sure any of them were that on top of pitch.” Chester singled out an equally interesting characteristic of Amador’s, namely, "her total willingness to be open and vulnerable in her songs and her singing. Honesty and even fragility. That gives listeners the chance to lean in and live beside her in that vulnerability.”

Herein, a visual/musical narrative of Amador’s life in the early 2020s, from the depths of despondency during which she decided to quit music, through the episode that turned things around for her—winning the 2022 Tiny Desk Contest—to the first days of her rejuvenated life and career. Music is not a contest, of course, and this video is weighed down here and there by the hype attached to Tiny Desk. But the video also provides plenty of glimpses of the irrepressible vivacity and joy that Alisa Amador pours into her music, especially when she’s singing to a crowd. She’s been a long time coming, and she’ll be here for a long time to come.

Amador, that is, is giving her audiences permission to step out from under the load they’re carrying, but not, like the narrator of Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight,” by shouldering the load herself, but by convincing them that it’s OK to feel lost, confused, and unable to fit in; she feels that way herself. Her vulnerability grants them license to acknowledge their own, without shame, but with self-acceptance. A good Amador performance is a communal self-regeneration. Covering this past October’s “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass” festival for the University of California at Berkeley’s student-run music magazine, The B-Side, a young Turkish woman who came to America to attend Berkeley described the impact that Amador, whose music she was barely aware of, had on herself and on the rest of the audience.

“I was sweating and exhausted,” wrote Irem Kurtdemir, “my mind muddled from the heatwave and midterm anxiety. Yet listening to Alisa Amador play songs from her album, Multitudes, changed the trajectory of my day. As she sang, shared smiles, joked between songs and connected with her audience spiritually [at her recent shows, Amador leads the audience through a mindfulness exercise], I felt grounded in my body. The concert was one of the first moments of my week that I felt truly present and able to enjoy the moment.

“As Amador progressed from note to note,” Kurtdemir wrote, “chorus to chorus, I found myself appreciating the majestic trees towering behind the stage, the soft grass beneath my feet, friends by my side, and [even] the venue decor. I can attest that her stage presence is truly special, something no YouTube video can properly capture. Listening to Amador’s vocals feels like a soothing surge of light coursing through your body.”

Kurtdemir was especially struck, and moved, by Amador’s ability to convey the complexity that a multicultural individual faces every day. Amador’s song “Extraño” (which means, depending on the context, both “strange” and “I miss”) contains the lyrics “Yo extraño las palabras que yo antes conocía/Con las cuales construía pequeñitas poesías,” or “I long for the words that once felt so familiar to me/With those words, I used to craft delicate expressions of my thoughts and feelings.” Those lines, wrote Kurtdemir, “made me reminisce on how I felt leaving my hometown of Izmir, Turkey to attend college in California. They rekindled a forgotten part of myself. They reminded me of Turkish words that are becoming less and less familiar to me.” For the young Turkish woman, “Extraño,” and Amador’s performance of it, “vividly encapsulated what it feels like to call multiple geographical locations, languages, and realities home: equally dreamlike and gut-wrenching.

“When Amador finished her set,” her ardent new fan wrote, “the crowd rose to their feet in applause, and for good reason. I encourage everyone to attend one of her live performances—it will be a transformative evening!”