An In Depth Interview with Gina Sicilia!
Considered a true rising star in the blues world ever since her debut album, Allow Me to Confess, brought her world-wide acclaim in 2007, Gina manages to raise the bar even further with The Alabama Sessions, which she recorded and produced in legendary Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and where she throws down a music gauntlet of soul, power, grit and energy for others to follow. Her songs and performances gracefully cross genres on the new album, too, with echoes of soul, rock and even Americana woven throughout the tapestry of sound she’s created on the new disc, bringing Gina’s music to an even wider audience.
“Even though I’m mostly known in the blues world, I love and I’ve absorbed all kinds of music — R&B, country, doo-wop, jazz, soul, pop and blues. So when I get inspired to write a song, it’s likely to go anywhere and even combine those styles,” Sicilia explains. Threads of those genres can also be heard in her previous four albums, including 2008’s Hey Sugar, 2011’s Can’t Control Myself, and 2013’s It Wasn’t Real.
Gina Sicilia got her first true taste of performing in front of an audience at age 19 during the weekly jams held at Philadelphia blues and jazz club, Warmdaddy’s, beginning in 2005. She’d already acquired her eclectic musical taste from her parents, who played all kinds of music on their home stereo, including pop tunes from her father’s native Italy. But after she ordered a packaged-for-TV compilation album called Solid Gold Soul that featured Bobby Bland, Etta James, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin and others, she become hooked on old-school soul, blues and R&B.
She had planned a career in journalism despite the encouragement of her musical mentor, Russell Faith, an important local composer and musician who’d written songs for Frank Sinatra. His death in 2004 galvanized Sicilia into action. “I started taking the subway by myself to the jams at Warmdaddy’s,” she says. “From the first time I got the courage to go onstage, the musicians there encouraged me.”
“I see myself as always evolving, reaching for a new place where I want my music to be and a way I want it to sound,” she proclaims. “I don’t know if I’ll find that place, but I’ll never stop searching.”
