SAMANTHA MACHADO: How Shyness Launched a Pop Singer's Career

By Adam Bernard

Although it may sound a bit odd, pop singer Samantha Machado owes her career to her extreme shyness. Well, her extreme shyness and the one big fan who really wanted to hear her sing. That fan was her father. "He loves it when I sing and I would never sing in front of him," Machado explains. "He wanted me to record a couple songs for fun for him, just for the experience."

This led them to Wade Martin's studio. A fortuitous choice as Martin happens to be the president of WM Studios, which is a subsidiary of JWM Records. "I went to Wade's studio randomly," she remembers. "My dad just found him. I had a blast. I had so much fun and Wade was really interested in working with me." For Machado it wasn't exactly a hard sell.

According to Martin, Machado quickly became a "studio rat," spending almost all of her time there over the course of the next six months. The 18-year-old Sacramento, California transplant who had spent most of her childhood signing in choirs and taking private lessons was eager to prove she was more interested in demo tapes than the desert air of her home in Arizona.

Machado was finally seeing the culmination of a goal she'd had since she first saw The Sound of Music as a child: she was becoming a recording artist.

The Sound of Music may not sound like your normal starting point of inspiration for an 18-year-old, but for Machado it marked her entry into the world of singing. She readily admits, "That (movie) is probably why I started singing. It was the first musical I ever saw. I know every song. I still love it." Machado's own work, however, is of a decidedly different fare.

Colbie Caillat, Sheryl Crow and Mandy Moore are the type of artists Machado counts as her contemporaries, although she notes she might lean a little more toward a "poppy" feel. Her album, titled Myself, is autobiographical in a lot of ways. Machado says "it explains everything I go through and how I feel." What she has found is that she is not alone in her feelings. "A lot of my friends will listen to it and say 'I didn't know you felt that way, I feel the same way'," she continues. "So I feel like I relate a lot to girls my age."

The first single off of the album is the title track, "Myself," which Machado says is about "finding yourself and believing in yourself even though something bad might have happened. You owe it to yourself to be the person you are." She adds, "it's also about letting go and to accept you're letting go of things and just be happy, and if you are happy let people know."

One thing Machado has no plans of accepting is the cliché of the pop singer needing to also be a dancer with seemingly every movement she makes being tightly choreographed and backed by a professional dance team. "I don't really dance and I don't want to do that kind of thing," she explains. "With my music, I don't know if it would even look right."

Forget dancing. For Machado, her music has a much more important power - the ability to bring her out of her shell. "On stage I'm not very shy," she states with a newfound confidence. Ironically, had that been true earlier in her life, she may have never needed to find a studio to record that CD for her father and none of this may have ever happened.