‘Songwriting is the way I process my experience as a human’
Award-winning singer Karimah blends past and present to create modern sound
She’s got one of those voices that can stop you in your tracks to find out who’s singing. That largely self-developed gift has led her experience in varied musical genres from an early age, and she has the songwriting craft to match.
But in the end, the most important facet to the progressive-alternative pop and soul sound of the artist who calls herself Karimah might be the passion she brings to what she’s doing.
“Songwriting is the way that I process my experience as a human,” she asserts. “It’s very personal, so when you’re hearing stuff that I write it’s my actual sentiments or feelings.”
Most songs come to her without specifically sitting down to work. And she seems like a pretty positive, upbeat person, so you might not expect the serious depths that some of her songs hit.
“There’s usually a twinge of pain or dealing with difficult emotions, dealing with topics like feminism and gender dynamics ... not always so overt in the way I might talk about them, but in a darker, painful undertone, talking about relationships and just being a person.”
When it comes to her non-musical preoccupations you might draw something from the fact that she has a degree in human ecology from the University of Alberta.
One way or another, Karimah’s voice demands wider attention. And while she might be the first to agree that finding success has much to do with being in the right place at the right time, she has won a certain notice already.
Born Ashanti Karimah Marshall, she grew up in Edmonton exposed to the usual pop radio and video sources, drawing inspiration from creative activities at the piano, visual arts and drama classes at school. After taking piano lessons from age nine, she taught herself to play guitar at 16, started writing songs and made her first 10-track CD. After starting out in coffee shops and cafes, she was soon heading up the rock band Noisy Colours as Ashanti, a project that continued for about five years.
She left that behind around 2012 to pursue solo efforts, re-branding herself as Karimah with a new sound reflecting soul, pop and jazz influences, and vocal expression in English and French.
French immersion from kindergarten gave her a leg up on language, helping her win the Polyfonik and Chant Quest competitions, and last year making the Top 24 in the highly popular TV show La Voix, Quebec’s answer to The Voice, where she became the first Albertan to make it that far. Her take on Celine Dion’s song D’amour ou D’amitié made it on to a Radio Canada La Voix anthology.
It didn’t hurt that Karimah collaborated with guitarist Robert Walsh to form Two Blue, winning the duo category in Edmonton Blues Society’s Memphis Bound Competition. That hasn’t gone much beyond their initial album but it furthered her innate understanding of the blues form that’s underneath so many of her other R&B, soul and pop inspirations.
“There’s no single influence but I like voices that are raw and visceral, that can be technically impressive as well.”
She loves classic artists from the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin and Freddie Mercury, and more recent names like Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys and Lauryn Hill.
Beyond her solo focus, Karimah’s current musical activities have several other alternating outlets including the band Gray, the HonorRoll Music Collective next to hip-hop names like K-Riz, and a part in the music-dance-poetry collective Black Girl Magic.
When it comes to labels, the singer suggests she’s a “retrofuturistic pop artist” because she works to incorporate traditional angles and current alternative styles all at once.
“My true creative direction is more experimental, and pushed toward a more modern sound.”
You can hear that range of influences in four EPs she’s recorded over the past few years, all available at her Bandcamp page. She’s busy again, too, working with producer Stew Kirkwood on her next set of tunes for release next spring.
“Most pop music today isn’t so acoustically rich but what I want to do is to take a song that sounds beautiful with a simple guitar or piano and create a conceptual, even theatrical arrangement that might play with sampling or chopping up the music, using a studio to throw out something more experimental.”