Joanna Sternberg

w/ Faustina Masigat 

Joanna Sternberg is a singer, songwriter, musician and visual artist born/based in New York City.  Joanna started taking piano lessons when they turned 5.  Joanna taught themself how to play the guitar and electric bass when they were 11. Joanna attended LaGuardia High School of Music and Art.  They started studying double bass during their freshman year.  Joanna got a full scholarship to Mannes College of Music, and studied classical double bass there for a year and a half.  Joanna decided to leave the school and take a year off.  During that year they did nothing but stay in their room and draw comics.  Joanna has been a freelance musician and visual artist since they were 18-years-old.  Joanna finished their double bass performance degree at The New School for Jazz & Contemporary Music, where they got a full scholarship.  When Joanna was 23, they began writing songs and learning how to sing.  At the age of 24 Joanna started singing in public while accompanying themself on different instruments. Today, Joanna continues to write songs, sing, play instruments, and create visual art.

Frustrated by academia and emotionally raw from a breakup, Faustina Masigat stepped away from her peers in her mid-twenties. She had come to realize that her personal and artistic maturation had been stifled by her relationships and her overly angular traditional musical schooling. She knew she needed to spend more time alone—committed to a process of unlearning—before she could move forward. As she peeled back the rigid layers of her youth, she began to write the songs that, a few years later, would make up her debut record. Seeking honesty over perfection, her approach to composition became much more intuitive; seated in the natural expression of not only her emotional life, but also that of a spiritual life, an expression of her own femininity, and a means of self-improvement through self-reflection. She became obsessed with the old, forgotten, second-hand guitars she would find in the “As Is” section of local music shops, believing that magic and songs still lived in the beat-up wood. One album track, “Willie Nelson”, manifested, fully formed, from one of these guitars - an ancient, labelless individual that she called “Red”.

The songwriting on her self-titled debut is all at once heartbreaking, intelligent, meditative and elegant - centered around a voice that is difficult to attach genre to. There is a quiet intensity running through the world that Faustina creates: sweet and heavy, a touch of angst, brutally honest, and smoldering. The album is understated, arranged as to allow Faustina’s effortless rapport with pedal steel player Tucker Jackson (The Minus 5, The Delines) to shine clearest. It’s a spacious and lush debut, with all of her vulnerabilities laid bare in songs hemmed together with fragile intimacy.

Faustina Masigat is out now on Mama Bird Recording Co. It was recorded by Rian Lewis, mixed by Ben Nugent and mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk, all in Portland, Oregon.