It’s not every day your professor tells you to drop out of college.
Six years ago, Julie Zorrilla considered her professor’s advice to quit studying vocal performance and apply for American Idol instead. She hesitated. She knew the kind of stigma that attached itself to talent competition. But she took a leap of faith and landed in the Top 24, before a performance of Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway got her eliminated.
“I think I slept for two weeks after the show,” recalled Zorilla, laughing. “I was so tired. I kind of needed a break from everything.”
Now 26, Zorilla is well past taking a break. She keeps herself busy with a residency at Dubai’s Rib Room at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers, singing pop, rock, jazz and Latin covers every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. It’s not her first residency in the city — she came over two-and-a-half years ago to sing at Waldorf Astoria, where she still performs poolside every Sunday.
“I fell in love with Dubai. I knew that I was always going to come back,” she said.
As a child, Zorrilla spent the first eight years of her life in Colombia, before her parents, both dentists, moved her and her older brother to Colorado.
She was just four when she started playing the piano. “My brother is three years older me so they put him in private lessons. Of course I wasn’t going to sit by and have my brother take lessons without me, so I cried until they decided to put me in lessons as well,” said Zorrilla.
Three years later, her father gave her first guitar, and at 18, she left to Los Angeles to chase after her dreams of becoming a musician.
“My brother does play piano still, but he’s getting his PhD in Economics at Columbia University,” she said.
“I always knew that I was going to do music. I don’t think that I had anything else that I was super passionate about, until I was actually a working musician.”
When she was 21, Zorrilla developed an interest in theoretical physics, but considers her fascination with science and the universe more of a hobby.
“I don’t have my brother’s capacity for mathematics, so I just like to study on my own time,” she reasoned.
And though Zorrilla tried returning to school after American Idol, life had changed too much. She wanted to build on the traction the show had provided her.
“I got to learn so much about myself as a person, as a performer, as a business woman,” she said. Jennifer Lopez, a lifelong idol of Zorrilla’s, was a judge on season 10, something Zorrilla described as terrifying.
“As a woman, somebody like J-Lo, you grow up seeing somebody this beautiful and talented and it’s definitely very intimidating to get up in front of them and try to prove your worth,” she said.
But Zorrilla, a self-proclaimed fashion-lover, had nothing to worry about. The two clicked right off the bat.
“She made a comment on the shoes I was wearing — she was always commenting on my outfits and clothes, so it was a really good icebreaker. After she made that comment, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can breathe now. Something of mine has been approved by J-Lo. It’s going to be okay,’” she said.
Zorrilla now spends her time travelling and writing music in-between residencies and freelance work.
“The politics of releasing music and writing music and getting it produced, it can be a little complicated sometimes. But I’m working on an album and in the process of signing to a boutique label in America,” she said.
She’ll return home this summer, and hopes to have another album to her name shortly after.
“It’s going to be a Latin project based on ten different Latin American countries. We’re picking traditional music from every country and covering it,” she said.
Don’t miss it
Catch Zorrilla at Rib Room at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday from 7.30-10.30pm, and during a Latin-inspired Friday brunch at Mundo every week until the end of May.
