Saleka Shyamalan, known professionally simply as Saleka, plays a complicated role in the upcoming film Trap. The singer-songwriter appears as Lady Raven, the fictional pop star central to M. Night Shyamalan's latest thriller, and also wrote, produced and performed a 14-song album for Lady Raven to perform in concert, the first single of which, “Release “,” is available now.
Saleka and her music not only played an instrumental role in the film, but it was visiting her during the tour that gave Shyamalan, her father, the initial inspiration for the project. “My dad is a very supportive father,” she says. Consequence, “and a great experience of our lives over the last few years has been in music venues. And I think my dad is very inspired by the things that he experiences in life, so this was something that he found very interesting.”
If you've seen the trailer, you know it. Trap takes place at a Lady Raven concert attended by seemingly good guy Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter, except the concert is actually a sting operation to capture Cooper, a serial killer at large. Throughout our conversation, Saleka was careful not to mention anything that would be too spoilery, but said that “you really see a lot of the process of a concert in the movie: getting to the venue early, the kids standing outside, and then the La setup and all the security, the opening act and the merch vendors – the complexities of that art form, of the live concert, are this great integral element.”
And many of those elements, he adds, “simply arose from my father being backstage. He is always imagining stories wherever he is and I think being in those settings was a point of inspiration. We talked about it a lot while we were in those places, like, you know, 'What if this happened, if we were here?' There are just a lot of things to feed off of, in that big room full of energy with a lot of people.”
Saleka began playing classical piano when he was four years old and was originally studying to go to a classical music conservatory. But as a teenager, he decided to explore songwriting and his own work. “Now I write everything, produce everything and compose. “I am very involved in the creative process.”
And creatively, she has recently “fell in love” with the process of writing songs specifically for movies and TV shows: “I really felt extra inspired and completely excited to have stories that were outside of my own life and outside of my life. the things I think about to feed myself and just expand my mind that way.”
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