Last week, I saw Yuna perform at Highline Ballroom in New York after my roommate raved about her and said she’d be an artist I like. Well, she was right. At the show there was something so familiar about her music, and the next day I realized that a friend of mine pitched her to me nearly three years ago.
“I think the most interesting thing about her is that she doesn’t compromise her Muslim beliefs but doesn’t drown her lyrics in religion,” she told me.
I couldn’t agree more. Her songs are so uplifting and while she dresses elegant and conservatively for a pop star, the Malaysian singer-songwriter grabs the concertgoer’s attention right off the bat. One song in and I was an immediate fan.
Before the show, a friend sent me her latest single “Rescue” and it struck a chord. It’s funny how sometimes the right song finds you. Lately, I’ve been questioning a lot of things, career-wise. While it’s my dream to move to Nashville, is it really realistic? More than anything, I miss the freedom of writing what I want every day, discovering new bands I’m passionate about and writing about them. That’s why I’ve vowed to throw myself back into this blog in 2014. At the end of the day, this is my personal resume and I’ll look back in 10, 20 years and remember that concert I attended that changed my perspective on life, that chance star-sighting at a bar in Nashville, and of course all the band interviews along the way.
Yuna’s lyrics also helped put this all in perspective:
“She thinks she’s all alone and all her hopes are gone and so I wrote this song so she can move along. Things were bad. She was in despair. Things were bad and you were never there, but things were bad, she came up for air. She said a little prayer, she found herself. Yeah she’s got light in her face, she don’t need no rescuing she’s okay.”