April Dawn

I grew up in Hawthorne with my Ecuadorian grandmother, speaking Spanish and listening to her sing along with records by artists like José José, and Rocío Dúrcal, who’s still one of my biggest influences. We’d play music and dance around the house, and she’d encourage me to put on little performances for her friends. With my cousins, I made up choreography and staged our own shows. I knew Grease, the musical, by heart. Long before I thought of music as work, it was simply how we spent time together.

My grandmother died when I was eight, but music and performing stayed with me. I grew up listening to Paula Abdul, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey. By my teens, Lauryn Hill and indie rock had joined the mix. Choir was a constant, too, from middle school through college, alongside musicals and vocal jazz ensembles. Those were formative years of learning how to listen, blend, hold my part and find my place in an ensemble. To this day, participating in a good production is still my idea of a good time.

Eventually, singing took me into bands and studios in the Bay Area, including The Slippery Slope. In the early 2010s, I followed Om At Last, a band I was working with, to Mexico. I fell in love with the tropical beaches of southern Mexico and the Riviera Maya and ended up staying for several years, making my living performing at beach clubs, resorts and private events. I sang blues, soul, rock and Latin music, worked on covers and original projects, and collaborated with musicians whose instincts were often very different from mine. Some nights were magical. Others were simply work. Both taught me a lot.

Upon becoming a mother, I returned to Southern California and went back to school. At Cerritos College, I studied commercial music, recording and production with Dr. Andrew Maz. With the support and mentorship I received there, I transferred to Biola University on a music scholarship and completed my bachelor’s degree in 2024. That chapter also gave rise to my debut single, Let Me Be a Woman, released in 2024, and its music video, which I produced and edited myself.

These days, I lend my voice to other artists’ projects while finding my way back to making music of my own. My listening habits keep expanding, too. I grew up with a lot of legendary music, but there are whole corners of rock, post-punk, new wave and underground dance music that somehow passed me by. Living in Los Angeles again, I’m discovering some of it now, often years after everyone else. I love finding a record that makes me wonder where it’s been all my life.

I don’t know exactly where those discoveries will take my own music yet. That’s part of the fun. I still love a voice that can be tender and fierce, with equal parts beauty and grit, over a rhythm that gets under my skin.