Saleka Shyamalan, known professionally as just Saleka, plays a complicated role in the upcoming film Trap. The singer/songwriter appears as Lady Raven, the fictional pop star central to M. Night Shyamalan’s newest thriller — and she also wrote, produced, and performed a 14-song album for Lady Raven to perform in concert, the first single for which, “Release,” is available now.
Not only did Saleka and her music play an instrumental role in the film, it was visiting her on tour that gave Shyamalan, her father, the initial inspiration for the project. “My dad’s such a super-supportive dad,” she tells Consequence, “and a big experience of our lives over the past couple of years has been in music venues. And I think my dad takes a lot of inspiration from the things that he experiences in life, so this was something that he found very interesting.”
If you’ve seen the trailer, you know that Trap takes place at a Lady Raven concert that seemingly good guy Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter are attending — except the concert is actually a sting operation to capture Cooper, a serial killer at large. Throughout our conversation, Saleka was careful to avoid mentioning anything too spoiler-y, but did say that “you really see a lot of the process of a concert in the film: getting to the venue early, the kids standing outside, and then the setup and all the security the opening act and the merch sellers — the intricacies of that art form, of the live concert, is this very big integral element.”
And a lot of those elements, she adds, “just came from my dad being around backstage. He’s always imagining stories wherever he is, and I think that being in those settings was an inspiration point. We would talk about it a lot while we were in those places — like, you know, ‘What if this happens, if we were here?’ There’s just a lot of things to feed off of, in that big energetic room with a lot of people.”
Saleka first started playing classical piano when she was four, and was originally studying to go to a conservatory for classical music. But as a teenager, she instead decided to explore songwriting and composing her own work. “Now, I write everything and produce everything and compose. I’m very just involved in the creative process.”
And creatively, she’s recently found herself “just falling in love” with the process of composing songs specifically for films and TV shows: “I really found myself being extra inspired and completely ignited by having stories that were outside of my own life and outside of the things that I think about to feed off of, and just expanding my mind in that way.”
