The day Alisa Amador decided to walk away from her career in music was, ironically enough, the day her career truly began.
“I was burned out and dealing with all this personal grief and trauma, and I finally just came to the conclusion that I couldn’t go on the way I was anymore,” she reflects. “And then as I was walking through the logistics of how I would break the news to everyone in my life, I got a phone call telling me that I’d won the NPR Tiny Desk Contest.”
Now, two years later, Amador is an artist reborn, both spiritually and sonically, with a stunning full-length debut to show for it. Recorded with co-producers Tyler Chester and Daniel Radin, Multitudes finds the bilingual singer/songwriter formally introducing herself with a bold, captivating self-portrait, one that serves not only as a testament to how far she’s come, but also as a celebration of where she comes from. Slipping effortlessly between Spanish and English and featuring guest appearances from Gaby Moreno, Madison Cunningham, and Quinn Christopherson, the songs here are raw and vulnerable, at once steeped in devastating loss and uncertainty, but also laced with the hope and resilience of young woman learning to find her voice and stand her ground in the midst of a personal and professional maelstrom. Certainly, Multitudes is a beautiful record — the way Amador’s crystalline voice cut through the album’s lush synthesizers, dreamy guitars, and cinematic string arrangements is nothing short of spellbinding — but more than that, it’s a fierce work of discovery and affirmation that reveals new secrets with each repeated listen, a profound, revelatory meditation on triumph and loss, endings and beginnings, identity and belonging, all delivered by a songwriter convinced she would never write again.
“When NPR called, I genuinely considered asking them to give the honor to someone else,” Amador recalls. “I felt like a fraud because after the death of a close friend in 2020, I’d completely stopped writing. But in that moment, it felt like something was telling me to surrender to the reality that music is and always would be my purpose.”
Amador’s passion for music is no coincidence. Born to a pair of Latin folk artists, she began singing with her parents’ band, Sol Y Canto, at the age of five, and spent much of her childhood traveling the country on an endless series of tours along with her twin brother, Zia. She spent extended periods with her grandparents in Puerto Rico and New Mexico, as well, before attending college in Maine, which enabled her to study abroad in Buenos Aires for a semester.
“From a young age, I saw exactly how insane and difficult it was to make a life playing music,” Amador recalls. “But I also knew I’d be lying to myself if I tried to do anything else.”
Fresh out of school, Amador began touring and recording as a solo artist, releasing a pair of well-received independent EPs and crisscrossing the country just as she had during her childhood. But over time, something about her experiences began to feel off, and the purpose and meaning she’d found in music began slipping through her fingers.
