Brandon Shah

Raw, soulful, comforting, troubled, moving, blissful, authentic – characterizing Brandon Shah’s music and person is a tedious task. If you ask him, he would say whimsical – whimsical in the beginning, whimsical in the effervescence, and whimsical in the invention. Shah auditioned for “The X-Factor: Season 2” on a whim when he was 15 and watched his voice take him to the Top 24 from a bird’s eye view.
With the acclaim, he toured internationally, starting in the United States and making it as far as London, 2 years after his television debut. All the while, sporting a happy-go-lucky vibrancy on stage and an earnest desire to move people – to share something. The first year or so of his kick-started career Shah had few originals. However, in his premature rise he embodied an old-soul maturity in performances that garnered attention from younger audiences and their parents. Perhaps the best description of Brandon comes from a fan when she said, “You could scream in my ear and it'd still be so soothing I'd fall asleep”.
Although he has yet to scream in anyone’s ear, Shah’s self-described genre of Soul-Folk transcends its implications with powerful story telling lacking neither vocal ability nor vernacular.
His songbook is, for the most part, unreleased. The music Brandon has made available to the world is in his first and recent release, Young Love – EP. Composed of 5 songs written the summer of 2014 before coming to Berklee College of Music, the EP encompasses all the raw, unadulterated emotions associated with learning to love for the first time. Brandon wrote each song in its entirety and, with the knowledge he acquired at Berklee, arranged each song for full bands, horns, and string sections. The project took 2 years with the bulk of the work occurring between December 2015 and April 2016. Brandon orchestrated the collaboration of 60+ producers, engineers, musicians, vocalists, and 6 visual artists to manifest the aural and ocular concepts his mind had dreamt up for "Young Love - EP". In an interview with The Verge – Campus Shah expresses his excitement for the EP, and that for him, it leaves “much more to be desired and the past couple years of writing fulfill that desire and then some.”
That whimsical spirit pours deep into the EP but the best way to realize his artistry is to meet Brandon Shah after one of his compelling live performances. Be prepared; he loves hugs.