Check Out Entifan Serrano’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Entifan Serrano

Hi Entifan, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started training in music when I was around 5. I always loved to sing around the house and in class and wherever I could, so my parents put me in lessons at a really young age which I’m forever grateful for. My mom says I used to suck my thumb and hum myself to sleep as a baby. Both of my biological parents are professional dancers and my birth-mom taught with me in her belly for almost her entire term, so I feel my connection really is nature and nurture. I learned piano and voice at the same time, my teacher told my parents that she wouldn’t teach me voice unless I also learned piano ! I didn’t like it then, but I’m so beyond grateful for it now. I tried various art forms growing up alongside music – like dance and painting, etc. – but music was always my constant. I picked up different instruments like violin, banjo, mandolin. I played guitar a bit, but never really connected to it. I went to Orange County School of the Arts from 7th grade to senior year and started out in the Integrated Arts conservatory, then switched over to Popular Music in my junior year. Around early high school is when I started singing more in the genre of jazz, maybe around my freshman year. I loved music theory so much and jazz just really challenged me and inspired me at the time. At one time in life, I really thought it was what I wanted to do ! In Popular Music I met beautiful songwriters and musicians there and it really shaped my way of performing.

After high school, I began at Berklee College of Music in the Fall of 2020. I majored in Music Therapy and minored in psychology ! When I first started learning about music therapy, it was so fascinating and exciting to me. I took a psychology of music class that influenced so much of how I view the human connection to music. I studied and got my degree in Music Therapy.

It wasn’t til the end of my 2nd year of college that I started songwriting. I had written a bit before, but nothing I really connected to and if anything I wrote for the sake of impressing people. I was so worried about proving my proficiency to other musicians, especially as a woman at Berklee I felt like I needed to be perfect in order to be considered. My friend Judah Mayowa is a big inspiration for me. He really was the first person I knew personally that had such heart-felt, gut-wrenching songs. One time in my first apartment, he was helping me with a song and he told me blatantly to just say what I mean and that I don’t need to have flowery words in order to be “good.” That really changed my way of writing and I live by that sentiment still.

I wrote my first song “Just Sex” in the April of 2022 and I didn’t release the song til much much later, about 2 years. It was the first song I wrote fully on guitar and I remember it felt so sacred – I had never truly felt that way about my own music before. Another friend of mine, Alix Page, told me once that she views songs as already out there, just waiting for the right person to find them and it really felt like this song fell into my lap. I find that my deepest connected songs all exist because I wasn’t trying to search for them. From there I just wrote and wrote and it really became my healing. Everything I could ever need to hear or realize always comes out through writing and that theory hasn’t proven me wrong yet. Something I put words to recently is that I rarely sit down and write just because I want to. I do it because I absolutely need to touch a guitar and sing something or else I’m gonna explode.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Goodness no ! But I would be so bored if it was. The first time someone showed interest in helping me put my music out was in the fall of 2022. I didn’t know anything about the process of putting out a song and I felt so far removed from it all. Tyler DeTulleo and Andrew Brinkman produced my first single, For You. I didn’t know who these people were and I felt so nervous to let two individuals, that I wasn’t close to, get to know my music and therefore me. It was bizarre. I had never shared or played my music for people I didn’t really know and it felt alien to me, but then all the sudden these people stuck around and were curious about me and believed in me. That process of producing For You was really so fun and a spiritual experience for me and I found some of my closest friends during that time. I was so sensitive and emotional about the process, but everyone in my community during that time of life really held me. For You came out the following year in the spring.

Then I played my first show in February of this past year ! (2024) It was my first time playing a show entirely of my music and I was so anxious about it. I had never performed singing and playing guitar, let alone an entire set of just my own music. It was just me and guitar on a little stage in a coffee shop in Boston and I swear I have never felt that way performing in front of people ever. I really don’t do well with public speaking and having a mic definitely elevated that experience. Once I started singing the first song I just unknowingly went into my own world and it felt like I was on the floor of my apartment and nothing else existed – which is how it always feels, but this time I was being witnessed. It feels a hair more comfortable every time I play a show, but I still get many nerves. It’s so fun and such a joyful experience to me, I know treating it with ease will come over time.

It’s easy to get discouraged about the art you’re making, especially when it’s so reflective of who you are at your core. The songwriting world is really so small in the grand scheme of things and we’re all 1 – 2 people apart from one another. Social media jargon, streaming numbers, what people say, all that can really get in your head ! It’s a difficult dynamic. All I create is for me and is the most authentic parts of who I am AND because it’s so sensitive sometimes it does really get to you. In the beginning of the process this feeling was a lot more prominent for me. It still comes up now and when it does I hold that part of myself with a lot of love and grace, and I know that I’ve really released a lot of attachment for my music to become whatever xyz is expected of me these days. As long as I’m doing it for me and it feels real and special as it always has, I feel aligned.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I use my songwriting so much as my healing and I feel that’s very apparent in my lyrics. I feel that my musical intricacy intertwined with my vulnerability is what makes my approach to songwriting so uniquely mine. In this new phase of creation I find myself genre-bending a lot more and exploring different textures/techniques on guitar. It’s been really so reflective of where I am in my journey.

I’m really proud of how much I’ve grown in my confidence as an artist. Having the courage to take risks and not center comfortability as I’ve developed has been really empowering for me and has taken a lot of self-love to be here !

What were you like growing up?
Growing up I was such a busy kid ! I was in a lot of different extracurriculars like dance, different instrument lessons, gymnastics at one point, etc. I really just had a lot of energy and my parents did their best to direct it somewhere. I was also a reallyyy sensitive, squishy being. I just felt so tenderly for those around me and was so overwhelmed by not having the language to describe what I was feeling that I would just cry so easily.

Growing up knowing I was adopted really gave me a different perception of understanding and empathy at a really young age. I’ve always known both of my biological parents and have pretty much always been in contact with them, with ebb and flow. My adopted parents never kept my story from me and it was really important to all four of my parents that I knew my entirety of how I got here and why and that I always had my questions answered. That plays such a significant role in who I am and why my creativity is so exposing in the way that it is. My first experience of creation was radical love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://entifan.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/entifannn/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Entifan
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/5N2WVzeLoWDt6m3CkVYBKW?si=fRfO2GgOSIK3G-UtS8Mrdg

Image Credits
Alex Senior