The Beginning
Fatima Gerendas is a singer-songwriter from Guatemala now based in Vienna. She found her passion for music at a very young age. When she was seven, she started taking guitar and recorder lessons and by the time she was nine she had won a singing competition for children and started taking vocal lessons. Fatima Gerendas also started songwriting and taking piano lessons at the same age. As time went on, she took part in workshops and classes for other instruments in order to understand the way they work in hopes that she would be able to use them in her compositions.
After working with many different teachers and musicians in Guatemala, she started producing her first album called “Viendo Más Allá” (“Looking Further”), released back in 2012 in Guatemala. The album had ten songs, five in English and five in Spanish, with a few singles that made the top charts in her homeland. Fatima Gerendas knew already back then that for her, one of the most important things about writing songs was to make people think about life and encourage them to follow their dreams and be true.
Between 2012 and 2014 she continued her music career while going to the Austrian School in Guatemala. She went to school in the mornings and spent her afternoons doing radio or TV interviews and then went to a music or dance class to keep on growing as a musician and an artist.
…right up to Vienna
In 2014, Fatima Gerendas finished her high school and decided to move to Vienna to study musicology. She finished her Bachelor of Arts in 2019 at the University of Vienna and while studying, she kept on cultivating her musical talent, especially songwriting, singing and playing the piano. At university she specialized in hit songs and earworms, and during her studies, worked at several music-related places, such as radios and multimedia studios, where she learned about the music industry and its creative and executive areas. She also worked with different musicians on small projects where she learned a lot about music production.
OUTCAST
After finishing her studies, Fatima Gerendas decided to get back to work on her own music, implementing all the knowledge gathered through her new experiences. With music producer Michael Hecht and video producer and director Lisa Punz, she started a project, her upcoming EP called “OUTCAST”.
The EP has five songs in English that contain strong, sociocritical lyrics and a “cinematic” sound with various influences from other musical styles such as pop, rock, drum&bass, R&B and cinematic music. Explained in another way: if there was a collaboration of P!nk, Christina Grimmie, Alessia Cara, Imagine Dragons and John Powell, it would probably sound similar to Fatima Gerendas OUTCAST EP. The songs in this EP talk about different reasons why a person could feel like an outcast and they are presented in a sociocritical way, because Fatima Gerendas believes, that if society would stop trying to mold people to be perfect, nobody would feel alienated.
Her music talks about…
…personal experiences and the feeling of being an outcast, for her latin roots, mature way of thinking and strong moral values may all have contributed to her marginalization. Fatima Gerendas believes that the perspective society has on people who are different, is a matter that needs to be talked about. The aim of her strong, sociocritical lyrics is to take a first step towards making a difference. Her songs talk about migration, physical illness, mental illness, peer pressure, failure and more… Her core message for listeners is: “Be true – be you, and be open to people who are different from you!”
“OUTCAST is a word we normally don’t want to be described as. Still, I believe there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It merely tells us that we are different and we can decide if we want to embrace our otherness or hide it. Being unique can never be something bad. What is bad, is that we sometimes belittle people who are different from us and make them feel like they are not as valuable as we are, which is just not true. I want people to realize that being an outcast can be a good thing and that in order to make a difference, they just need to be true to themselves and be open to people who are different.” –Fatima Gerendas
Follow Fatima Gerendas on Social Media
If you want to find out more about Fatima Gerendas’ music, project and ideas, follow her on social media!
YouTube: fatimagerendas
Instagram: @fatimagerendas
Facebook: @fatimagerendas
Twitter: @fatimagerendas