Swati Sharma: from trombone to guitar

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The Atypical Songwriting for Swati Sharma

Swati Sharma doesn't necessarily love Bruce Springsteen. The out singer-songwriter may be from the East Coast and sport a jean jacket on her album cover, but her decision to record the Boss' "I'm On Fire" for her debut LP was just a compulsion.

"I got dumped really badly and I had the flu," Sharma said. "I was couch-ridden, really depressed and really, really sick. I'd heard 'I'm on Fire' five or six times in my life, and I think I picked up the guitar and I was almost, not covering it, but playing it because it was in my head again. I just played it the way I heard it in my head. I didn't have a copy or anything like that."

On Sharma's debut album, Small Gods, her version of the desire-and-desperation tune sits alongside tales of picking up prostitutes in Atlantic City ("Blackjack") and aching to leave behind a town full of heartbreak ("Dodge"). It's an album devoid of boring clichés and repetitive rhymes. Instead, Sharma is more akin to Diane DiPrima and other Beat poets who weren't afraid to touch on topics of lust, greed and emotional abuse.

"I've always heard songs in my head," Sharma said. "They just became so loud that I had no choice but to make it a physical thing."MORE

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Grace Potter and Catherine Popper of Grace Potter and the Nocturnals

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Grace Potter and the Nocturnals - White Rabbit (Jefferson Airplane Cover)

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Pioneering growl queen: Mary Abaza

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Mary Abaza is a Russian guitarist and vocalist with an astonishing vocal range (article linked from the Wikipedia source) :

- Tell me about you as a singer... What brought you to be the growler in the band? And have you ever encountered comments like "female can't sing Death Metal" or such ridiculous comments like that?

....

About me as a singer? Well, I got a unique voice of large compass from contralto to soprano. Then I got a good education- I studied singing in jazz school. It helped me to find my own way of singing death metal applying some jazz tricks, by the way it helps me also in creating music. When I began singing death metal I was crazy about John Tardy as a vocalist, I mean that hysterical manner. Then I added to my voice same black metal high tones and found inside my throat those low sounds.MORE

According to wikipedia, she's one of the world's first female growlers:

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