Little time passed since the school year began when Zaza Alanko, a first-year Stuart Hall student and senior from Stockholm, Sweden, started to strum the guitar in Mr. Belote’s classroom. Her voice sings original lyrics, words held by melodic chords that quickly reveal Zaza as a passionate musician. She is a singer at heart; “I like singing any song, really. [Any song] that connects to me,” she states, “I’ve written many songs, and it's my way of feeling my emotions.” While not genre-specific, Zaza finds her music as a medium for expressing hope amidst the inevitable difficulties of life. She prefers not to end a song on a dark note, but instead provide a shimmer of light, a comforting warmth. “There’s one quality of depressing music, it’s that you don’t feel alone. I think what you write can be a lot of that, but I think that what you share should have a little seed of hope,” she says. A lingering positive message, even a sliver of it, she believes serves herself and others a way of moving through hardships.
Zaza has found inspiration from writers such as Leonard Cohen and Charles Bukowski. The kind of writing that is raw, spontaneous, and authentic is valuable to Zaza’s expression. She allows her songs to naturally write themselves. The call to create, in Zaza’s case, is not one to go unanswered. In her own voice, she answers fully.
The following is an excerpt of a song written by Zaza Alanko:
What the wind sees in your eyes, (oh)
What the skies see in your eyes, (oh)
What the seas see in your eyes,
In your eyes, (oh) in your eyes, when
Darkness was surrounding me,
I thought you were mine to keep, but
See you weren’t mine to keep and
See you don’t belong to me.
What the wind sees in your eyes…
Sckolher Berry