Today, the producer, singer, and songwriter drops her sophomore album 'Shabrang.'

Sevaliza has lived anything but an ordinary life. She was born in Tehran, but fled with her family as refugees to the Netherlands when she was young. She began playing <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/michael-jordan-90s-fashion-style-icon">basketball</a>, leaving home as a teenager on a basketball scholarship, and ending up on the Dutch National team. She has a masters degree in communications and taught herself music production, singing, and songwriting.&nbsp;

Sevdaliza started releasing her own music in 2014. She dropped two EPs in 2015, The Suspended Kid and Children of Silk, and released her debut album, ISON, in 2017. She&rsquo;s amassed over half a million listeners on Spotify, received praise from <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/music/billie-eilish-billboard-woman-of-the-year-2019">Billie Eilish</a>, and, to top it all off, walked at Paris Fashion Week in 2019 as the star model of the Y/ Project show. Needless to say, Sevdaliza has worn many hats.&nbsp;

In honor of the release of Shabrang, Sevdaliza spoke with L&rsquo;Officiel USA about walking in <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion-week/paris-fashion-week-celebrities-photos-events-fall-2020">Paris Fashion Week</a>, being independent, and holistic living.

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L&#39;Officiel: What have you been up to you during quarantine?

Sevdaliza: I think, like most people it was divided in between trying to get a hold on what is actually happening in the world, followed by the layers of business, personal life and reflection. I was one of the people who actually lost a lot of work during <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/maeva-marshall-freckles-mental-health-interview">quarantine</a> because I was supposed to go on tour, so I had a lot of time open up. I wouldn&#39;t say that I&#39;ve done work that has been, like, mind-blowingly revolutionary stuff. It was just kind of getting in touch with the grounds of what it is to not be on the road constantly and also learning how to deal with the state of the world and a pandemic that laid bare a lot of other systemic problems that our world is rooted in. I was more an observer than I was actually doing a lot of things.

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L&#39;O: Have you felt creative during this time or the pressure to be creative?

S: Perhaps the first few weeks, because you have no idea how long the period is going to take and what is possible and what is not. For everybody, it was a very unstable period. I think at this time in the US, it&#39;s definitely still different than it is in Europe. In Europe, we are almost back to functioning regularly on a daily basis. But yeah, definitely felt the pressure in the beginning, but then it kind of died down.

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L&#39;O: What is your creative process and has it changed since you first got started with music?

S: My creative process is based on improvisation. A lot of it is very intrinsic and intuitive. I see that in almost all the aspects in my life, the way I create a piece of music and also the way that I prepare a <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/beauty/adut-akech-beauty-lifestyle-model-interview-2019">dinner</a>, a lot of the times I go into the kitchen and I don&#39;t know what I&#39;m going to do and then I ended up with a meal. I also really like collaborating. I really like to work with someone else, whether that&rsquo;s in visual aspects of creativity or music-wise, I think it&#39;s very healthy and natural for human beings to pair up, so I really enjoy working in pairs.

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L&#39;O: Can you talk a little bit about your music background and how you got into it?

S: I don&#39;t have a music background. I&#39;m an autodidact; I taught myself production, songwriting and singing, and then I slowly started to gravitate towards creating music. It was a later stage in my life. At first, I was on the road to having a university degree and being a professional <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/travel-living/nike-paris-female-national-team-athletes-2019">athlete</a>, but I decided that that was not the life that I envisioned for myself. I had the idea that I might be able to do something more creative and that little spark actually just blew up. It abducted me and it took me with it. Suddenly I was reading music and I started some writing and I started singing. And from there, I developed this world that I have now.

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L&#39;O: Tell me about your new album.

S: This is my sophomore album and it represents for me that it&#39;s kind of like a letter that I wrote to myself. It is my own holy grail. I had to write and record this album in order to regain my trust and belief in life and in love. I always felt like an observer, and I think that with this album I&#39;m materializing my observations of life and love in that particular period of my life&mdash;the past few years have been a roller coaster ride. But I think that with the album, I&#39;m always trying to return to my life. With this record, I also hope that it will bring light and hope to the people that are listening to it. My first record was kind of like a very long <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/wellness/sound-therapy-with-tibetan-singing-bowls">therapy</a> session and this is more of a jump towards conveying the light that I found in those first few years and always trying to go back to it.

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L&#39;O: Tell me a bit about your fashion experience. I know you walked in Paris fashion week in 2019.

S: Fashion and even things like acting are worlds that have been kept away from the marginalized people forever and I really am excited about all the recent developments in these worlds because it actually allows me to dream to be able to walk on a catwalk at Paris Fashion Week. I can envision myself designing. I can envision myself being a part of a movie or whether that is directing or acting. I can envision myself in all of these creative fields where I feel like prior to the past few years, the people that I&#39;ve been involved in these fields have been very one dimensional. Not the people themselves, but what they are supposed to represent. Now is the first time that I actually see that it is not a one dimensional anymore; there are a lot of fluid <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/film-tv/halloween-anti-heroine-horror-movies">characters</a> that are not just a regular size or just a plus size. We can actually be multiple things now walking down the runway or directing or acting. That opens up the world for real human beings and that is very exciting to me. I would say that I haven&#39;t really been involved in fashion and in film as much as I want to, but it was definitely an amazing start to walk the catwalk in 2019.

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L&#39;O: What inspires you? Where do you get your inspiration from?

S: I have a very rich imagination, just within myself, I have a lot of inspiration. I don&#39;t really have creative blocks unless I&#39;m worn out, which is quite normal. But if I&#39;m just in a regular place going about my daily life, then I always have creative ideas. I do think that they start to live as soon as I have someone in my life that believes in them or talks to me about it. Even now, as I&#39;m conceptualizing these words in my mind, I&#39;m taking <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/the-coolest-french-creatives-to-follow-on-instagram">creative</a> concepts that have never actually been talked about, but your question triggers my mind to be creative about the answers that I&#39;m going to give you. That&#39;s how I kind of function with creativity in itself.

I think that I have&mdash;and I think that it&#39;s just the female component in all human beings&mdash;I think I have the creativity in my belly and that everything is inside of me, but the sharing it with other human beings makes it real. Then it starts to live and then it starts to live outside of itself and that&#39;s why I touched on the subject of collaboration because I think that that combines it. I find a person or I share with someone and then it becomes real and then I start to dream about it. I also get excited by seeing other people be amazing in their own craft. I can feel super inspired if my partner is <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/categories/art">painting</a> and I just sit in his studio and watch him. Then I feel like I want to compose a piece of music, whereas 30 minutes before, we were watching Netflix and I would never feel that. Other people inspire me when they are doing what they&#39;re good at, it doesn&#39;t need to be something artistic.

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L&#39;O: I know you&#39;re interested in holistic living. Can you talk about that a little?

S: In terms of holistic <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/categories/travel-living">living</a>, it has been a process that I developed over the course of these intense years. You start to see yourself as the main stable factor in your life, especially if you&#39;re traveling around as much as I do. Your own being becomes the thing that you have to keep stable and that&#39;s where the holistic part comes in.&nbsp;

For me, holistic living is trying to be as aware as possible of yourself and how you as being move through this continuum of time and space. Along the way, you get reached out with these pieces of experience that can become knowledge or that can become a problem to find a solution for. For instance, I suffered severe burns on my legs not too long ago. I did a deep dive into what actually happens to the <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/beauty/winter-skin-care-products-hydrating">skin</a> and why it functions as it functions. That adds a layer of knowledge to my holistic knowledge that I would never research if I didn&#39;t go through it. I think the life that I have, which is very privileged now, allows me to see things and to experience things that others might not experience as fast as I do. Whether that is ecosystems or cultures or systematic oppression, I get to travel the entire world, I get to see how people live and how they function. You get this insight in globalism and all these subjects and I think that is where my interests were for holistic living.&nbsp;

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L&#39;O: What do you want people to know about you or your music that they might not know already?

S: In this day and age I want people, and especially independent artists, to feel empowered by my story. There are a lot of artists out there who, and I don&#39;t blame them, but they have this entire business structure behind them. I don&#39;t. I am really fully <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/fashion/queer-fashion-brands-to-shop-now">independent</a> and I&#39;m still doing it. I&#39;m still living the dream that I always had envisioned when I started out doing this. That story might be able to empower others to be able to pursue what they really feel. I don&#39;t know if they don&#39;t know that about me, but I do think that being an entrepreneur and an artist is not easy. I think that a lot of people don&#39;t really know what it&#39;s like to run a business and create the product that you&#39;re running the business for. That creates a lot of problems because artists don&#39;t know what they&#39;re running into when they start creating music. I would really like in the future as well to help people to be able to feel like really pursue a business.&nbsp;

For instance, I got a question from someone saying, &#39;do you know any good managers?&#39; and I said, there&#39;s a saying in <a href="https://www.lofficielusa.com/men/robert-thurman-interview-2018-issue-03">Buddhism</a>, it&#39;s about greed, it&#39;s like, if you want something really bad, you don&#39;t see that it&#39;s in front of you. I think, personally, that you should look in your surroundings to find the people that you&#39;re going to work with. There&#39;s not going to be the perfect manager for you across the world, because the people that you want to work with and collaborate with should understand who you are. The pandemic definitely laid bare that a lot of people don&#39;t understand each other at all. That is something that people might not know about me is that I&#39;m pretty outspoken on all of these subjects, but I just never felt comfortable yet to talk about them. I guess this year might change that.

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L&#39;O: What&#39;s next for you?

S: I think living in a balanced way;&nbsp;I&#39;ve never been able to do that and I think we might be here.

Want to see Sevdaliza live? She will be performing at the historic Royal Theatre at The Hague on August 31st. The event will be streamed globally; you can get your tickets <a href="https://www.sevdaliza.com/live/">here</a>.

Autodidactic Genre-Bender Sevdaliza Writes A Letter to Herself On New Album ‘Shabrang’

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