Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

Wandering Soul

The vocals are mostly soft murmurs and the rhythms are spare, but there’s no denying the punch behind Meklit Hadero’s restrained melodies. It’s not just their overtly sensual nature — “I know how you kiss your lovers,” she purrs in “It Will Be Quiet” — but their boundless cross-cultural roots. Hadero inflects each song with folk, jazz and Afrobeat traditions that speak to her upbringing as an Ethiopian-born, American-bred singer. Called “an artistic giant in the early stages” by the San Francisco Chronicle, Hadero is currently launching a campaign to bring together musicians along the Nile River in multicultural exchanges of sound. Sample songs from her full-length debut, On a Day Like This..., on Friday.