Latham, NY native singer/songwriter Zan Strumfeld has spent the majority of her life trying to figure out who she is. As a self-described pseudo-Luddite and romantic, she has taken to the written word since she was six years old.
Weak from heat and a broken heart, Zan picked up her hardly-played guitar and starting write songs in the summer of 2011. Things escalated much quicker than she thought they would, and somehow, after a few open mics, she began playing cafes, bars, and festivals. In less than a year, Zan has played more than 50 shows in the Hudson Valley and Capital Region.
Her lyrics undress her deepest secrets, reflecting her relationships with others, dissecting minute circumstances of self-discovery, and understanding life's truths. Spending most of her time with a steel string guitar, she's found nylon strings to be more suited for her voice and the sad but seducing rhythms she likes to play.
She is heavily influenced by writers including Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, Laura Marling, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Richard Brautigan. Although she would love to be a folk singer/songwriter who dabbles with soul, jazz, funk, indie, and country, she has yet to find a genre she can comfortably box herself into. The "Genre of Zan" has been the closest she has come to.