Amanda Pascali

Presented By KGNU Door time: 7:30 Show time: 8:00 Amanda Pascali embodies the complexity of modern identity. Born to a mother from Cairo who grew up in France and an Italian father raised in Romania, she’s a mixed-race, bilingual Gen Z troubadour perpetually caught between worlds. Quoting poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo, she says, “I’m often ‘too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both.’” Rather than lamenting this displacement, Pascali has transformed it into her artistic superpower. In her bright red teenage bedroom, she started writing songs about her life and family, later singing them at coffeehouses and motorcycle bars. Her curiosity eventually led her to Palermo on a Fulbright fellowship, where she spent two years developing To Sing and Recount (Canta e Cunta) — a digital storytelling project that translates and revitalizes Southern Italian folk songs, revealing their startling relevance to contemporary social issues worldwide. At fourteen, surfing the internet, Pascali happened upon Sicilian folk legend Rosa Balistreri’s music and was immediately struck by her rebelliousness. “She was more punk than any of the bands whose posters hung on my wall,” Pascali recounts. “Rosa defied all the norms of her time. She endured famine and poverty: learning to read at thirty-two, picking up a guitar at forty, then turning both into tools of resistance.” Pascali began translating these canzoni d’autore and traditional songs into English, marveling at the vivid characters populating her songs. They reminded her of Bob Dylan’s protagonists, but wilder, rawer — a thousand times more revolutionary. Her new album, Roses and Basil, reimagines these and other folk song translations alongside her own immigrant-American folk songs. “Wake Up, Baby,” the lead single from Roses and Basil, exemplifies this time-traveling approach. Starting with one of Sicily’s oldest serenatas — the story of a man singing his marriage proposal to a lover’s balcony while she…