We recently connected with Xori Amar and have shared our conversation below.

Xori, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

my first album, ‘melody LN.’

this project was the most meaningful to me in so many ways: it was my first album; it was created during the beginning of the pandemic when I had a ton of free time on my hands to reflect on life & turn it into creation; and the title of the album is is named after the first street that I grew up on.

Initially I wasn’t going to do an album, just drop a single each month, but eventually songs just started coming one after the other and they all sort of fit this theme of a romantic relationship being synonymous with driving down a street that ultimately ends up at a dead end. It has its twists and turns, ups and downs, excitement and sadness. lots of duality.

I felt like everything started to come together during the album creation when I took a drive down to my old house on melody ln to brainstorm for the project and just see what feelings came from it. it felt like reminiscing on an old love, some place where I used to live, love, laugh, make memories, but just was a distant memory that you’ve moved on from and ironically enough, the street I lived on had a dead end.

Xori, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Before I got into music, I used to write poetry. Eventually my poetry and passion for music kind of just collided at the time. I remember writing my first verse on the way to a track meet in high school. I was 16 or 17 at the time.

By the time I got to college, I went from recording using Garage Band and Apple Headphones in my basement, to going to the studio to record and started taking my craft way more serious and building my brand.

As much as I enjoy the process of creating my music, I also love performing my music on stage the most because I get to bring the music to life and connect with the crowd by allowing them to get to know me through my stage presence.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an artist is the satisfaction of going to the studio & laying down a song idea in your head and it comes out exactly as you envisioned or even better than you thought. In a lot of ways, it feels like you’re trying to scratch an itch and when you finally scratch it, it feels so satisfying. I feel like if I don’t get the ideas out on a canvas, it’ll drive me insane until I do it.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Something that I am currently unlearning is perfectionism. Of course, I always want to strive for perfection, but sometimes you can hold yourself to impossibly high standards, to the point where you get to the point where you don’t ever drop any music. Sometimes I can mistakenly take perfectionism as a healthy way of motivating myself, but it can turn toxic when I start to nitpick everything and it ends up taking the organic spirit of creation out of the art. I feel like I kind of got worse about perfectionism after dropping ‘melody LN’ because I felt like it was my baby and in some ways I tried to compare everything I was doing to it, and always trying to find ways to top it, rather than allowing the new work that I would eventually create to have the space to be its own thing. It was as if my fear for dropping any bad follow ups to my album drove my perfectionism, which took the fun out of the music until I started to switch my perspective and get back to the spirit of creation that I had when I first started making music.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thexoriamar/?hl=en
• Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/xoriamar
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZXSbUafyQTVbKpZnHGPDGg