Who the hell is Zingara

Four years ago, she released her first music and now she’s already on her fourth headline tour. It’s going well for Zingara. For The Crystal Children, her most recent EP, was released on November 1, and it’s a love letter to her “childhood dreams, the universe and the collective.” Ever since she was little, Zingara has been inspired by these themes and now, she’s bringing them to life through her music and through workshops at festivals. 

For The Crystal Children is a follow-up on her debut album The Code of Dreamz, released earlier this year. Both musically and artistically, you can see how this EP goes even deeper into creating its own reality, following its own universe. We had a chat with Zingara and talked all about manifestations, her latest liveshow, and what’s more to come from her. 

Hi Zingara! Congratulations on releasing your For the Crystal Children EP! Can you tell us more about your inspirations behind it?

A lot of my inspiration comes from my dreams as a kid. I’m really embodying my childhood dreams and bringing them into my music. My ‘For The Crystal Children’ EP and tour is inspired by a folder called ‘The Crystal Children’ I was given by my aunt as a child, she’s my psychic witch aunt. It had a lot of information about crystals and spirituality. I thought it would be a really cool idea to work with, so I took that and ran with it. In my new music, I embody the lessons I learned from her in that folder. Throughout the past year, all the teachings I’ve learned as a kid that have to do with following the universe, the signs, doing whatever you want, creating your own reality, and bringing those other world ideas that I get to experience in my dreams at night and bring them to real life… That’s what my biggest inspiration has been.  

Talking about manifestations and spirituality, you led a ‘Create your own vision board’-session at Lost Lands.

That was really cool! I’ve been dancing, and making art and music my whole life. It just clicked one day that I could teach that in my music and then everything kind of took off. I feel like I’m meant to show people the way that I embody my life and go about life experiences. It’s literally given me my dream life. I’d love to teach more classes like that. I’ve done a couple at Bass Canyon and Lost Lands now, and it’s always been good. In the workshop, we create vision boards and we make time capsules to come back to and read together. It’s been really rewarding because I’ve had people come to my vision board classes the year after and tell me that their manifestations came true. That’s why I do it. 

How does this spirituality connect with your music?

I truly believe that everything is energy, and if everything is energy then that means that music also holds energy and power to it. There are studies that show that certain energy points, like the chakra points in your bodies, relate to certain keys in your music. I’ll purposely write some of my music in certain keys, based on where I want to feel it and where I think that a listener could get healing from it. For example, the key to your heart is ‘F’ and so I write a lot of music in F-minor. When you pay attention to it, you’ll feel it in your heart. I love electronic music, because there are infinite possibilities with it. You can take all those messages and ideas, and heal yourself and others.

I started learning all of this when I was 11. Growing up, I was one of the only people in my area that was interested in spirituality and those kinds of topics. I started studying music in college and it was during Covid, when the pandemic first hit, that my music career started to take off. I started to go on TikTok and make videos about my experiences with spirituality and crystals, and people started to resonate with my videos. That’s when it clicked for me, and I decided that I wanted to write most of my music about that if I was gonna be putting it out there for people to hear.

Fast forward four years, and you’re ready for your fourth headline tour. How does that feel?

Every emotion. I feel infinite blessings and then there are also, for lack of a better word, curses in there. There’s so much happening all the time and it’s all a manifestation of everything I’ve wanted. I never thought that it could happen so soon. During COVID, when I was writing these songs, I didn’t think anything of it besides that I enjoyed writing these songs. I almost didn’t release anything because I was nervous that people were gonna think of me as this loopy spiritual girl. But it clicked and I felt so much love, but at the same time this amount of love and attention was also quite overwhelming because how am I going to keep the story going? And what else can I teach myself to teach others?

For those who don’t know what manifestation is, can you explain?

For me, it’s about stepping into your own power and the belief that you create your own reality. Your thoughts and your actions are a reflection of what’s in front of you. No matter what, you have the power to take control of what you want in this life and you can make your dreams come true. When I started to learn that as a kid, I thought that it was super cool, and I wanted to see it work. I started getting involved with different practices of manifestation, like journaling, telling myself affirmations like, “I can do this and I will do this,” and getting into that mindset of abundance. I started with the idea of, “Let’s have fun with life and take things less seriously.” This completely shifted my energy and now I am living my manifestations that I did a couple years ago and wrote down and journaled about. 

You can also see these manifestations coming back in my music and my artwork. In the artwork for ‘The Code of Dreamz’, you can see a little girl sleeping in what’s supposed to be my room and you’ll see the angel and the devil. Those are projections of my mind, and ‘For The Crystal Children’ is a continuation of that story. The little girl in that cover art is a little bit older, and she’s learned some lessons. When you get older, you dive more into your power. Now she has many arms and wings, and is embodying that growth. When we’re children, we’re taught magic is real, but then you get a little older and everyone tells you to stop believing in magic… With my music, I want to bring the magic back into our lives and embody that full-on like child self. Magic does exist. Maybe not in those same ways, but there still is magic out there. 

My generation, we’re so much more open and accepting of new concepts and ideas and breaking the social norm, “breaking the robot system” is how I’d like to call it. You have to go to school, go to college, get a job, get married… We’re all breaking that and it’s really cool. You can see that shift. The whole tour is not only dedicated to our crystal children and our oversouls, but also to the collective of, “We’re here, we’re saving the world. We’re doing cool shit, we’re having fun and that’s the whole point.” We’re here to have fun and be silly and bring our dreams to real life and have them come true.

You’re also bringing four special guests… 

I have a lot of friends coming on tour with me. Firstly, I’ve got Gardella and Steller. They came with me on my last tour and since I wanted to do a part two of Code of Dreamz but still keep the story going, I knew I wanted to bring them. Their energy is incredible. We also have Sippy. I hadn’t toured with her before but I love her energy and her music and everything she brings to the table and to the scene. It’s so uplifting and positive. Then we have Super Future who has toured with in the past and is such a good person. I just really wanted to make sure that everybody that was coming with me is there for the music and they have the actual passion, but they’re also uplifting to be around.

Absolutely. It’s so important to have uplifting people around you. Is that how you choose people to work with on your tracks as well? 

For sure. Steller is on the EP as well, she lives in Florida as well, a couple hours away from me so she comes and visits sometimes and we have studio sessions. The track on the EP is a collaboration called ‘Rhythm of Life. We started that over the summer and it accidentally manifested into something so magical. On a couple tracks on the EP there’s my friend Maurice Brown featuring. I met him over the summer at Shambala. He is an incredible artist, he plays the trumpet. I played at the Brooklyn Mirage this summer with Black Tiger Sex Machine and Maurice lives in Brooklyn. Steller happened to also be in Brooklyn so I went over to Maurice’s studio and we recorded the horns and the trumpet that you hear. Then Steller came over and then we all got to perform it live the next day at the Brooklyn Mirage. Looking back at these kinds of stories and even looking at my goals at the beginning of the year versus who I met this year… Maurice is one of those people I met on the road and I got incredible energy from him as an artist. He’s so passionate and it brought a new spark to this stuff. Watching him play the trumpet live and getting to record that was so much fun. 

What do you think got you to this point?

First of all, a good community. I would probably not be mentally stable if it wasn’t for the community, friends and family I have around me. That is a huge thing, my support system. 

Besides the fact that I have an amazing support system, and team of friends and family, it’s also important to me to have my own creative space. One of my manifestations during COVID was, I need to move out of Maryland and I need to get my own place, so I came to Florida. I finally have my own sanctuary here, where I can sit and comfortably create. My support, my music and my comfort here is what gave me the opportunity in the first place to give people a piece of me. It’s my mindset too. I love doing music and I love doing all this, helping people and making people feel things, no matter what that feeling is, and bringing that out of them. That’s what keeps me going and that’s what’s got me here.

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