‘A Bowl For Lilith’ is an unconditional love joint that allows ones youth to die, feel all roads, and feel circumstances from varying perspectives before allowing access to the first sense - oneness. This was my process for a decade and it was hard for us all to watch, to say the least. I allowed myself to be coaxed down Alice’s rabbit hole one more time to tie a realistic bow on an era. I never care to look too put together when I know the world isn’t. Funny enough, this EP process was the most sober and the most emotionally harrowing, as it took to form in 6 months.


The Ali's, as a family, spend a lot of time on the beltway or running around the district listening to CD's and radio. We frequent NPR, WPFW, 92Q, WKYS, WHUR, all the way up to Faith 104.1. Grandpere likes Gil, Nanna likes Stevie, Patrick likes Johnny Hallyday, Bertukan likes Tewahedo Mezmur, Mom likes Ray, Dad likes Prince, Dylan likes Pharrell, Zaki likes Tyler, I like DOOM, Mikala loves all of us.


My migratory homelands have created as much cultural longevity as they have bondage overtime. As many Habesha women leave education in their tweens to raise scholars and warriors, we mourn our stolen youth through active divergence - yet a divergence that gives way to cultural impotence benefits no one, simply put.

The hardest lesson for me to grasp in adolescence, and in this creative process: The musical culture I grew up in in Washington, D.C. was a work-in-progress with a fair amount of questionable activity. As I was ready to throw the towel in on this narrative, I was noticing the men around me still reeling from the escapades of yesteryear, or looking deep into my character to notice any development toward 'healing'.


My reclusion from or overexertion of love in moments of hardship is a survival tactic passed down to me by my old-world mothers, as our elders have sacrificed generations of women to the staggering front lines of ignorance-for-cultural-preservations’-sake. It might be a bad look, but it's real on me. My wayward Muslim sistas comprehend Malcolm X by the means of freedom being accessible through all possible dispositions. Let me be the Ballot and the Bullet, feel me? Mutability, n’est-pas? This Butterfly Free.99 on Bandcamp forever.

I love you, DC.

-Shara M. Ali



PS: next album in Amharic & French.