IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2020 - 17

ROCKING WITH ORIANTHI

G
You

©SHUTTERSTOCK/ANDREA VOLPICELLI

Mean
It

Growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Orianthi's house was
full of music. Her father had a great vinyl collection, which
included Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton. Her father
played the guitar, too, mainly Greek music, and when Orianthi was around five or six years old, she walked into the
living room and sat down to watch him play. She loved how
Orianthi
it looked, his fingers moving up and down the frets. The
sounds he could create from that guitar just seemed to offer
endless possibilities. Forget piano, which she had started playing when she was four. There
had been something kind of boring about it-for her anyway.
Picking up guitar was a way to bond with her father and spend time together, but also,
there was how it felt when she held that guitar in her hand. "As soon I picked it up, I just
felt a really powerful connection," she says.
She played the acoustic guitar for a few years. Then, when she was 11, she saw
Santana in concert. And from the moment he played "Europa," it was all electric for
Orianthi. There was so much soul in his work.
While guitar was her life, school wasn't so easy. Everyone at school was listening to
the Backstreet Boys while she was enjoying Cream and Bob Marley. "I was bullied.
I dressed like a hippie. I listened to music the other kids had never heard before.
It was like I was from another planet, really. I felt like an alien," she says.
Orianthi put everything into her music, signing with her first manager when she was 14. She produced her own first record from her
house and sent a demo to Santana. Then, when she was 15, she
left school behind and began her career as a professional musician,
playing gigs three nights a week. Before her 16th birthday, Orianthi
performed in a stage show with three-time Grammy winner Steve Vai. Vai
would become like an uncle to her.
She made her second record when she was 18, which she again produced
entirely on her own out of her home studio. Then, Jorge Santana reached out to
her. "We've been cranking your record in our offices, and we love it," he told her in an
email. Not long after that, when she heard Santana was coming to Australia, she bombarded him with press kits. The day of Santana's show, her manager called her. Santana
wanted to meet with her. She had been gigging the night before until about 4 a.m., and
next thing she knew, she was jamming with him at sound check. Then, he invited her up
on stage. She stayed on that stage, in front of 10,000 fans, for 45 min.
"It was like being thrown into the ocean. Sometimes, those good musicians that you really look up to and admire, they do that to you as to know if you're capable and to see how
you do in different situations," she says. "As an artist, you want to be constantly pushed.
We're constantly thrown in the deep end, all the time."
Later, Santana had this to say about her on an Australian talk show: "If I'm going to
pass the baton to someone, she's my first choice." In 2006, she relocated to Los Angeles and
scored a deal with Jimmy Iovine at Interscope Records.
There's no pinning her down. She's jammed with Alice Cooper, Michael Bolton, and
Carrie Underwood. When Michael Jackson was looking for the best in the business for his
"This Is It" tour, he came looking for Orianthi and, after she knocked it out of the park with
a blazing "Beat It" solo, the job was hers.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MWIE.2020.3020448

Date of current version: 4 November 2020

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