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As a kid, Amanda Pascali didn’t see the difference between herself and those around her — until one day, it became impossible to ignore.

“My first language was broken English,” says Pascali, a first-generation American. And when her family moved from New York City to Texas, she struggled to fit in with her peers. “In the words of poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo, I constantly felt ‘too foreign for here, too foreign for home, and never enough for both,’” Pascali remembers. “I didn’t have anyone to really talk about those differences with,” she explains, so at 12, she picked up a guitar and created that space for herself.

These days, Pascali is a lauded singer-songwriter and song translator: a former Fulbright fellow endorsed by the Biden Administration’s State Department and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and a current Harrington fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Online, she’s built a following interested in her work translating Sicilian folk music, especially the songs of Rosa Balistreri, and exploring the stories and themes in this older music that still resonate today. Pascali’s new album, Roses and Basil, mixes original music and lyrics with translations and ancient Sicilian melodies — another chance to prove that no matter what century or country it originated in, art is universal and timeless.

“I sing these songs for anyone who has ever felt like they didn’t fit in,” Pascali says, “to invite them to join me in the space that I’ve created where everyone can be proud of who they are and where they come from.”

“Wake Up, Baby!” reimagines a traditional Sicilian serenata (serenade) from the woman’s perspective. Over a melody that could be straight from a Ronettes song, Pascali incorporates lyrics from the serenata “E Vui Durmiti Ancora” (“And You’re Still Sleeping”), in which an admirer pleads for his love to wake up and acknowledge him. “The girl doesn’t come out because, the guy thinks, she’s asleep, but I think, just as a Gen Z girl in the 21st century, that this woman is not sleeping — she’s probably just ignoring him,” Pascali says with a chuckle.

However listeners want to interpret the story, unrequited love is an enduring experience. “The song draws parallels between past and present,” Pascali adds, “connecting the experience of waiting beneath a window to the modern frustration of being, as my generation would say, ‘left on read.’”

The album opener “Amuri” (literally, “Love”) offers a different experience: Set to a groovy cumbia rhythm, the song is “about losing your way in life because you’re so deeply in love with someone that everything else you know, you feel like it’s been a lie up until now,” Pascali explains. The narrator of the ancient Sicilian poem that opens the song is so overtaken by this romance that the object of their affection has replaced any god, religion, or anchoring truths they knew before. “That was really kind of scandalous for that time,” Pascali notes.

“Amuri” reoccurs throughout Roses and Basil: An acoustic version closes the album, and the song is also the base of the midpoint “Intermezzo,” which combines Pascali’s cacophonous ambient recordings from Sicily with an elegant, classical piano melody, played by producer Robert Ellis, himself an acclaimed Americana singer-songwriter also from Texas. Pascali had never worked with an outside producer before, but she knew she wanted to try something “big” with this album. As it turns out, Pascali says, “I think I was ready for this for a long time, and I didn’t know that I was.”

“Amanda brings a very well-informed and refined, yet also very easy and natural, energy to the table,” Ellis says. “While she clearly has a deep respect for tradition, I think what makes this record so special is Amanda’s particular willingness to put herself into the music here and now with all of her influences — trying to truly honor the past, rather than just reenact it.”

Pascali has long admired and appreciated Ellis’s music, but she admits she didn’t fully understand just how perfect a match they were until they got together in the studio. “I think we had a lot of things in common that I didn’t realize until I made this record with him,” she says, explaining that Ellis always understood her references and vision, and always knew just what to do to bring her ideas to life. “I would have never guessed Robert had similar artistic interests to me, and I never imagined that he would bring his Texas Piano Man energy to my bilingual, multicultural folk record,” Pascali adds.

In addition to finding inspiration in ancient works, Pascali also finds it among her own family. “Sweet 16” is a song inspired by her youngest sister, a reflection on the unfairness and uncontrollability of the world we inhabit. On “Cleopatra,” Pascali offers a bilingual tribute to her mother, who was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up between Paris, France, and New York City. She and Pascali’s father, a refugee from Communist Romania with Italian roots, met and fell in love in Brooklyn.

“’Cleopatra’ is about my mom, but it’s also about all women — all immigrant women, all women that lead, that break down barriers in male-dominated fields, that are brave enough to go to a new place and start a new life. Women who are girls’ girls. Maybe women who have daughters. Women who love seeing other women move forward and succeed,” Pascali says.

Roses and Basil, Pascali knows, is arriving at a dangerous time for immigrants in America. “I really want to believe that this is a place that symbolizes my family: a place where people from different continents, from different religions, could fall in love like my parents did,” she says — but she knows it’s more complex than that, more complicated than how she saw this country as a child.

“It feels like there’s been this kind of global shift that definitely has played a part in my music, how I make music,” Pascali says. “But I think, at the end of the day, what I aim to do with my music is to tell the truth, because I think, now more than ever, the most revolutionary thing that one can do with art is tell the truth.”