Local singer hopes to make it big in the Big Apple

By Aida Ahmed

Wednesday, Aug. 24, 2011 | 1:55 a.m.

Making the move from Sin City to the Big Apple isn’t easy for 21-year-old Lynda DeFuria, but the aspiring pop singer and songwriter said she has big dreams that may not come true if she stays in her hometown.

Besides the fact that she’s been dreaming of moving to New York since she was a child, the Las Vegas native believes she has a better chance of making it on the East Coast.

“There’s just not a huge live music scene in Las Vegas,” said DeFuria, who had an album-release show at Freakin’Frog, a valley nightspot for new artists. “There aren’t a lot of venues for up-and-coming artists.”

A product of the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts, Defuria is a recent graduate of the Berklee College of Music in Boston and writes her songs from beginning to end sitting at the piano, which she also plays.

This month, she also won the 2011 Broadcast Music Inc. John Lennon Songwriting Scholarship for her song “Where You Stand.” The award came with $10,000 to go toward her student loans, which is a good thing for Defuria, who is preparing to live on an artist’s salary.

“Everything is not quite set up yet,” DeFuria said. “I’m still apartment hunting.”

She hopes to join a wedding band to make some money. It’s not far from her summer gig singing by the pool on a Holland America cruise ship to Bermuda, which helped her save money for her big move.

“It was definitely something new for me,” DeFuria said. “My first time on a ship and I was getting settled to live there for three months.”

But like every singing experience, she said, it helped her mature. “I learned over 200 songs in just two and a half months this summer,” she said.

So, with her award in hand and a few years experience behind her, DeFuria said she’s ready to start playing shows in New York and New Jersey and eventually come out with a full album in a year. And if she can, she said, she’d love to come back and perform in the city where it all started.

“I’d love to do a mini-tour back in Vegas,” DeFuria said.