Sheena is a singer-songwriter from Northwest London who can belt out a beyonce ballad better than most. Her main influences are artists like Mariah Carey, Brian McKnight and Beyonce, which explains her fondness for big ballads. We met up with Sheena a while ago to discuss her music, career so far and her future plans.
Sheena has known that she wanted to carve out a career in music since the age of 12. Her parents were both musicians and she says that she got into it at a very young age, stating that one of her main influences was Mariah Carey in her earlier days.
Since then she has become a rather dedicated musician - she studied at the prestigious Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, has her own band to back her up and has recorded an album. She is currently working on another album, for which she is writing all of her own songs. Quite a decent music CV, eh? No wonder she is now signed to an independent label.
This is just the work side of things, and as Sheena said, ‘hard work will always beat talent', and she really has put in a lot of work, as well as having a huge amount of talent to go with it.
To hear her sing, a lot of people would wonder why she doesn’t just go on one of Simon Cowell’s shows and blow them all away, but Sheena clearly believes in putting the work in and would rather get recognised through that than a talent contest.
Sheena is also a talented songwriter.
"Hard work will always beat talent"
It can take her from 20 minutes to 6 months, depending on the amount of inspiration: 'Sometimes it takes certain things to trigger off what you're writing about. Situations have to happen in your life so you are able to write to them and you are able to come at it from a real point of view rather than just writing crap'. From this we can assume that unlike one of her heroes, Beyonce, Sheena will not be writing a song any time soon with an entire verse consisting of a repeated question about which sex runs the world.
After the interview we went to hear her sing. Sheena had brought her guitarist Jack along, and I was really looking forward to hearing them perform. As you can see from the video, she ended up singing a song that she wrote herself,
'A Million Little Pieces', which really blew us away. Again, before singing, she stated that she was a bit nervous, which was either covered up incredibly well, or she has that performer’s ability to convert the nerves into energy and put on a better show. Her personality definitely shows through in her writing and it is plain to see that a lot of her songs mean something to her and are very inspired.
Sheena is currently working on her album, which she says is very eclectic and is therefore taking time to get the order right so that it flows. Judging from what we saw, we have high hopes for this project. When you couple this with how hard she works and her amazing voice, you end up with an artist who is definitely one to look out for this year.
