A Life Less Ordinary Issue #40

Ximena Sariñana leaves behind telenovelas to shake up Mexico’s music industry

By Selena Fragassi
Published: June 1st, 2009 | 12:00pm

Despite the title of her premiere album, Ximena Sariñana is anything but Mediocre. At just 23-years-old, the Mexican singer has already lived a life few could dream of, the latest accomplishment being the media firestorm and growing fan chatter that her acclaimed album has ignited. As the fastest-selling debut in Mexican history, the dramatic compositions and effortlessly gorgeous vocals behind the Spanish language album have already landed Sariñana nominations for two Latin Grammy awards and a nod for the Best Alternative Rock Album in the Billboard Latin Music Awards. More ambitious still, is her nomination for an American Grammy — a testament to Sariñana’s magnetic talent, considering the nomination came before her U.S. musical debut at Austin’s SXSW festival.

As she talks with us about her earliest experiences in the entertainment industry, it is immediately clear that Sariñana’s glory days have been a long time coming. Born in Guadalajara, Sariñana’s family abruptly moved to L.A. after her birth and spent the next five years stateside as her father, Fernando Sariñana, a noted Mexican film director and producer, pursued a master’s degree in film at UCLA. Her mother, Carolina Sariñana, is an equally accomplished screenwriter, and her aunt, Angélica Rivera, a famous actress, so it was only fate that Sariñana would learn to read lines before writing music, eventually landing roles as a villainous child actress in the Mexican soap operas known as telenovelas, and later, in her father’s major motion pictures.

“My parents and I have always been very close so working with my dad was a lot of fun,” she says. “My parents worked together ever since I can remember, so it was natural to have me working with them as well.”

Despite her early start, Sariñana never fell into the self-destructive tarpits so many young actors get stuck in. “Even though I was a child actor, I never saw myself as one. For me, it was just a hobby like ballet class, and my parents never took it too seriously either. School always came first,” she says, noting how her mother became an inspiring role model for her commitment to her own art form. “It was always weird going to set because my mom was never the kind of person to quit her job so that she could live off the money I was making. So I was always by myself and would see all these girls and their mothers just sitting there for the entire filming. I remember thinking, ‘What, they don’t have any brothers and sisters? Their mother doesn’t work?’”

Although her expansive body of film work made her somewhat of a celebrity at home, Sariñana is proud to have never found herself exposed on the gossip pages. “You have to be calling for attention to get it,” she says. “[Being in] the telenovela world, it is such a gossip prone place … but I’ve always tried to be very low-key. I’m not the type of person who has a lot of actor friends or is surrounded by people who like to be in the spotlight. I don’t go to a lot of parties. I’m pretty much in my own world and my friends are the friends I’ve had since primary school.”

In fact, the only insight Sariñana readily gives about herself relies in the self-discovery that premeditated her album title. “The name of the album [came from a] very personal point-of-view,” she says. “After listening to it a couple of times, I realized that when it comes to personal matters, I have a problem with the mid-point.”

Pointing to standout tracks like, “Normal” (“The heart has no remedy/ All love that is helpless will eventually disappear/ And what you felt was normal”), and “Gris,” (“To distinguish the heart reason/ It’s all an illusion/ I want to escape/ Gray is all there is”), she says, “I’m a very extremist person. I’m either very, very happy or very, very sad — and that’s something that I noticed in my songs. I wanted to confront myself with the recurring theme that I always seem to portray the midpoint as something negative.”

In many other aspects, Sariñana’s artistic vision is a blending of a life that has, for the most part, become a similar story of black and white experiences. Not only has she found herself stuck in the middle of two art forms, but also as a product of two cultures.

After spending her formative years in America, Sariñana’s family moved back to Mexico where they enrolled her in a British school system that capitalized on the amalgamation of her dual citizenship – something that has strongly influenced her musical style.

“I’m very much involved in both American and Mexican cultures. When I was growing up, I listened to more Anglo music,” she says citing Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Simon, and Tracy Chapman as favorites. “But when I was about 16, I was more interested in going back to my Latin American roots and started listening to tons of music from Mexico, Brazil, and Peru.”

It was a trend that would stick with Sariñana as she began to write Mediocre, opting to stick to her roots, even though English was her first language. “Learning the language of my nationality was something I really wanted to achieve and I’ve always been better at writing and reading in English anyway, so I thought maybe if I did a Spanish album it would be a good challenge,” she says, noting that she finds emotions easier to express in Spanish. “Spanish is a more descriptive language. It provides a more complex and fuller way to describe one emotion; in English, it’s limited. For example, in Spanish, to say ‘I love you,’ you can say ‘te quiero’ or you can say ‘te amo’ so there’s two ways of saying one thing. In English, it’s ‘I love you’ and that’s it.”

Spanish lyrics also gave her the opportunity to influence the tone of the whole album, an alt-jazz revue that combines haunting piano melodies with wailing horns to complement her powerful, albeit vulnerable vocals. “For me, lyrics really depend on the sound and I like how the Spanish language sounds surrounded by the instrumentation that the album has.”

Although the move could have proved risky and limiting in creating a more expansive fan base, Sariñana’s multicultural appeal has rapidly been attracting attention from both Mexican and American audiences, with Rolling Stone calling Mediocre “one of the strongest debuts by a female singer-songwriter since Norah Jones’s Come Away with Me”

Granted, Sariñana knows some people may not be able to understand the lyrics literally, but she believes nothing gets lost in translation when you stay in character. “My intent on this album was to be as honest as I could,” she says. “I truly believe honesty transcends any language barriers.”

For her next album, Sariñana has already been starting English lyrics, as more of a creative outlet than a tactic to break into the American market. “The U.S. is the center of the entertainment industry — it’s a very competitive world there,” she says. “I would like to be successful in the U.S., but only if it felt natural.”

The last thing she wants is to perpetuate an image of Americanization, something her multicultural upbringing could easily lend itself to, with her fair skin, perfect English, and hippie-inspired clothing style. “Even though I may not seem Mexican to a lot of people because of the fact that I speak English so well and grew up for part of my life in America, I do think I represent a part of Mexico,” she says adamantly, with a strong sense of pride and connection to her nationality. “I’m just a different face of Mexico. Maybe I’m not your typical ranchero musician living on the border, an image that a lot of Americans may have, but I’m definitely Mexican.”

Today, Sariñana continues to call Mexico home. “Where I live, Mexico City, it’s the biggest city in the world and is definitely a very cosmopolitan place.” In fact, the city’s music scene is a prime example of how the city is keeping up with modern tastes, says Sariñana, citing the advent of an independent, alternative radio station that has been gaining increasing popularity from scores of fans tired of the pop overload that had dominated more commercial stations.

“People really started to tune into this radio station because it’s more in touch with our youth than most pop music nowadays in Mexico,” she says. “There’s a huge alternative and independent movement going on right now, even musicians from abroad are coming to perform. Radiohead had never come to Mexico and they just played two nights here for 50,000 people.”

With the growing division of the pop and alternative crowds in Mexico, Sariñana finds herself once again confronted with the midpoint: “In Mexico right now, [music artists] are either very, very pop or they are very, very rock and alternative. There’s no midpoint,” she says. But where Sariñana has found success is using the opportunity to move from being stuck in the middle and instead see the opportunity as one to promote her genre-bending style. “There’s a couple of artists like myself that are starting to break the middle ground,” she says. “My songs started to get airplay on the alternative radio station but they were also a great success on the pop radio stations. I think people are starting to realize that there can be qualities in pop that can go hand in hand with other music forms. And yes, a woman can sing in alternative rock bands.”

The last point is a concept she has struggled with for years, trying to find her niche in what she sees as a male-dominated industry. “[Music] is still very much a man’s career. I know that now from touring all the time — out of 15 people I’m the only woman. But I like the fact that, more and more, there are women that are doing music and doing interesting music, especially in Mexico and Latin America. And it’s not just pop or rock,” she says of the global phenomenon that is changing the face of the industry.

But for Sariñana, it isn’t just the scarcity of women in music that’s frightening — the idea that women are often expected to rely on the mediocrity of being a one-dimensional pop star to launch their careers is deeply troubling. “I definitely hope more women look outside of the pop world and realize that not all of us want to have perfect bodies, and not all of us have perfect bodies. And not all of us only want to talk about men in a very superficial kind of way. And not all of us want to just be desired by every man on the planet. I mean sure it would be nice,” she says laughing, “but it should never be a priority.”

For her, the pop world is just a modern manifestation of the vision of perfection that haunted so many Stepford Wives, a tongue-in-cheek image captured in the album’s cover art.

“We thought it would be a good idea to portray this idea of women in the 1950s because of the contrast in that era when everything women portrayed was perfection: the perfect housewife that knows how to cook and sew and her hair is always in place and she always has the perfect body and is always happy,” she says, showing how the wisdom of her acting days has played itself out in the birth of her far-reaching musical character. “In reality, so much perfection was actually a promotion of mediocre, of a mediocre life, because nobody would aspire to be something different.”