I recently sat down with Alexa Lima and talked with her about how she started playing the piano, what are some of her creative influences and the direction her band, Waking Astronomer, is taking.

It’s always interesting to me to talk with musicians. They’re so expressive and  put so much of themselves into their work you can’t help but be drawn into their world. Alexa sounds like she has a great start to her career.

Hi, my name is Alexa Lima and I am a pianist and composer as well as a music teacher

I started with piano.

At about the age of four, I told my mom “Hey, I want to play piano”

And she was like ok, lets go!”

So she took me to a teacher and unfortunately the teacher was like “Well we need to wait and see…when she can read.”

And I was like “But I can read!”

So she was like, “Bring her back when she’s 6” so my mom did and that was, you know, when I started my real studies in piano.

My main influences are visual art cause I’ve been brought up through visual art my whole life. I mean, my mother and my other brother (Pash Lima) are artists so thats a very big influence.People in my life influence me as well, other musicians that I kind of feel a connection with. A lot of them are dead actually which can kind of weird but composers like Erik Satie is one of my really big influences, Claude Debussy is one of my influences as well as Thelonious Monk so I kind of draw a lot of inspiration from a bunch of different things, as well as nature, nature is a really big inspiration for me as well.

My bands name is Waking Astronomer, we are Atlanta based and my role in the band is keys player and I also contribute to writing some of the music.

We kind of got together in October of 2013, we’re all solo artists in our own right so it kind of started as like a joke kind of like “Oh hey guys, you know, we should probably, you want to start a band? and we’re just like “Ha Ha Ha”, and then we’re like “No seriously, we should probably do this” so thats kind of how it started and then every since then we’ve just been constantly writing music, playing shows every month and so now we’re kind of taking that time to really focus on recording our first collection of songs.

Ever since like the beginning of our whole creation, we’ve just kind of vowed not to go into the whole process of finding our name, it just kind of happened, that’s what we’re kind of saying…maybe we’ll reveal it at some later date.

We all are kind of across the board as far as our influences go and stuff like that. I was trained classically and went into jazz before going to school so we have classical, jazz; our vocalist Afua (Richardson), she’s very affluent in soul and R&B, then we have Jeremi (Johnson) and Brett (Leggitt) who are very affluent in electronic music and so we have that aspect and then Sari (Raza) is also trained classically as well jazz on her cello and vibes so we have different genres mixed together.

Afua and I have our side duo called Afua and Alexa and we’ve written a couple of songs in the past and one of our songs called Starchild was actually licensed for a film called Middle of Nowhere and it was released I belive back in 2012 and basically we were approached by the music supervisor and she was like “Hey, I really love your music; I am looking for music to be placed in this film called Middle of Nowhere and we’ll really like to see if you guys would be interested” and we were and so it was a really cool experience because our song was licensed in that film so we got to see it in there it was a pretty cool experience.

Right now, we’re just focusing on recording our very first album, and then hopefully playing some more shows, doing like a release of some kind and you know, just keeping that whole creative flow there alive and well.

To find out more about Alexa and her work with Waking Astronomer and Afua and Alexa, you can go to www.wakingastronomer.com or www.alexalimamusic.com

Mike