By Jojo Hoffman
Staff Writer
Unlike most freshmen who are still trying to find their way around a new high school, Mira Costa freshman Charlotte Sabina is finding her way through the music business as she achieves her lifelong ambition of singing, song writing and performing for live audiences.
By age eight, Sabina was taking piano lessons, had mastered the guitar and was writing both lyrics and musical compositions.
“My piano teacher was a wonderful Russian classical musician, and the pieces I was learning inspired me to attend classical concerts,” said Sabina. “I went to the New York Philharmonic to listen to the live music, and I loved it.”
Sabina writes pop rock music, a genre that mixes the pop style and lyrics with its guitar-based rock melodies. In 2010, she released 15 songs on YouTube and iTunes one at a time, including “Eye for an Eye,” “I Know Your Secret” and “Time Doesn’t Heal Everything.” In 2013, Sabina released her first extended play of six songs on both iTunes and YouTube.
“I enjoy making music for others to relate to because it allows me to express myself freely through the lyrics,” Sabina said.
In order to maintain her singing voice, Sabina practices three to four hours a day. In addition, she spends her nights recording at the Village in Santa Monica and Studio 637 in Hermosa Beach or performing for live audiences. Sabina’s performances have ranged from doing solo acoustic gigs at restaurants to opening for Jon Bon Jovi at the Best Buy Theater in New York on Oct. 12, 2011.
“Opening for Jon Bon Jovi was a mixture of adrenaline and excitement, but most of all I was so grateful for the opportunity to be on stage,” Sabina said. “In that moment, I knew I wanted to be a rock star. Nothing more and nothing less.”
In 2014, Sabina entered four of her original songs into the International Songwriting Competition and placed first in the Teen Writers category. Her prize was a summer scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston for the summer of 2014.
“This was a huge honor for me because there were no politics or personality involved at all,” Sabina said. “I just submitted my songs into a sea of tens of thousands of great songs from great writers, and then one day they called me and said I had won.”
According to Sabina, she plans to continue creating music for her followers. She has been in the process of producing her new record, “I Know Your Secret,” with her longtime friend and producer Jeffrey Lee Campbell. The style of the record will be modeled after authentic rock but with a modern twist. Many of the songs have already been released to iTunes, but the full record will be released soon.
“Excellence in any field is considered a lifelong pursuit,” Campbell said. “There is no finish line; artists are always continuing to grow.”
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