There is an irresistible touch of mystery surrounding Bulgarian born singer songwriter Geri X. Since making St. Petersburg, Florida her home in 2005 she has intrigued, and delighted her many admirers, leaving them spellbound by the sheer quality of her song writing and intimacy of her live performances.Her album Anthems Of A Mended Heart is the culmination of nights she spent nervously turning up for ‘open-mic’ nights. This is turn led to appearances in coffee houses and restaurants, and finally, music venues. All the time the ‘X word’ was spreading rapidly. The mysterious singer’s hard work was finally paying off.Yet, despite all of this, she still remains something of an enigma. Online interviews that I have read seem to raise more questions than answers. However, one play of Anthems Of A Mended Heart reveals far more about her than any of these interviews would seem able to. Like all good songwriters she lets her music tell the stories.The remarkable thing is that when she moved to Florida in 2005 she had very little English at all and even wrote some of her early songs from that period in Bulgarian. This made her first six months of being a pupil at high school in Tampa extremely difficult. As a child in Bulgaria she had studied both the guitar and piano. One way she found to express herself once she had arrived in Florida was through her songs. Within six months she had learned the language and began putting those songs into English. From there she released several homemade CD’s before her first ‘official’ release Can’t Make You Happy arrived. Suddenly she was no longer a well kept local secret and her live performances began to set her apart from the rest. Geri’s immaculate guitar style shines through from the eleven songs on Anthems Of A Mended Heart. However, it is her voice that totally captivates the listener. She is able to inject genuine honesty and emotion into her songs, ranging from joy to pain, pleasure to heartbreak, and fun to frustration.
Somehow she is able to take you musically by the hand and lead you through each separate emotion leaving you feeling that you already know her. Her music connects and is easily accessible. Despite being her own harshest critic, her songs link strongly together with a line of consistency that underpins the whole album.
Article comments
1 - wmseryan
WMSE is actually 91.7FM in Milwaukee.
Nice to see Geri getting some international attention. Keep up the good work.