What is that old saying? Oh yes, “Some people are more interesting than others.”
Well, we don’t really know if that’s a bona fide old saying or not, but it certainly applies to Rita Shukla, the fabulously talented Brazilian singer. Yes, we know that using superlatives can sometimes be taken the wrong way or even be criticized. However, since we have seen this incredible (there we go again) woman perform we are thoroughly confident in our choice of adjectives to describe her.
We are also content to give you some tidbits about her very interesting background. She grew up in Campinas, Brazil, which is a big city not too far from Sao Paulo. When she was only four years old Rita began taking piano lessons. She apparently loved music and singing so much back then that she would tape record herself singing using her dad’s recorder along with his audio cassettes. The only problem with that is that his cassettes were important to him and they had already been recorded on. Rita simply taped over her dad’s recordings and of course, he got a little upset. But not for long though. How can anyone be upset at a four-year old for being passionate about her music. That’s the way we see it too.
Well, as she was growing up, Rita learned how to belly dance, how to play the electric guitar (with dreams of becoming a rock star), learned how to act and learned how to dance the Flamenco, among many other things. She performed in stage plays, went to university to study acting, music and musical theatre and then she did more plays and then – cutting to the chase – then she moved to Los Angeles, that’s right, the big city in sunny Southern California – to study at AMDA, (American Musical and Dramatic Academy). The reason she moved there and enrolled in that school was because she knew by that time that singing was it for her – the big IT. So she naturally wanted to be where much of the action was and is for singing and performing music.
Some of her musical influences have been performers she grew up listening to: Pat Benatar, Heart, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses and Pink. We just wonder which future artists are watching Rita and how she is influencing them.
