Shekhinah

She articulates the hopes of a particular generation and her first album is a departure from group-think

Shekhinah Donnell and I first met on a Sunday afternoon when we were in high school. I sat crosslegged on the carpet of my home’s living room surrounded by my history, English and life science notebooks — glued to the television on which Idols was showing. When she began singing, I was meant to be immersed in the content of the hardcovers, but I had to glance up to see who this glorious voice belonged to. I still remember my first thoughts when Shekhinah and I made eye contact: “Doesn’t she have homework to do like the rest of us?”

I had to brush off the allure because I thought she would be like the ones before her, the ones who always ace the audition, soar up the ranks of reality television and fade away at the end of the season. I had to ignore how her voice engulfed me and how drawn I was to this stranger, this peer, when all she did was sing a cover of Lauryn Hill’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.

After encountering her that day in 2012, things between Shekhinah and her peers — us — remained a little quiet. We only kept in touch with her through Instagram. Her posts let us in on her media studies at AFDA and how they required her to perform from time to time. We would promise to catch up with her over listening to the music she had posted on SoundCloud but, like most promises made by acquaintances, we never had the time to make time for her.

It was only in 2015, when her official debut single Back to the Beach, with Kyle Deutsch, was released that we started interacting with Shekhinah on a day-to-day basis. By 2016, her voice was always visiting a dorm room in my university residence. If it wasn’t the single Let You Know, produced by Sketchy Bongo, then it was her collaboration with Black Coffee on Your Eyes that was blasting through various speakers. What started out as a girl-meets-peers situation four years earlier had become an almost daily ritual.

Shekhinah is not designed to fit into any one musical mould. How would you classify an artist with a fast-paced flow, repetitive lyrics, a sultry voice and harmonies that give off an old-school romance feel? Her sound and subject matter are designed to push boundaries. Although there’s no easy way to limit Shekhinah to a genre or two, for