Fredi Shehadi is a New York–based guitarist, composer, and recording artist whose career spans live performance, record production, contemporary instrumental music, and television and film composition. Over several decades, he has built an unusually multifaceted career — moving fluidly between the recording studio, concert stage, broadcast television and film with the rare perspective of someone who has operated simultaneously as performer, composer, producer, engineer, and storyteller.
Shehadi began playing guitar at sixteen, going on to study at Berklee College of Music, the Eastman School of Music and Ithaca College. Early mentors including Gene Bertoncini and John Scofield helped forge a musical language grounded in the eclectic fabric of the Blues, R&B, Rock, Jazz and classical. After relocating to New York City in the 1980s, he entered the world of professional recording through Generation Sound and Regent Sound Studios in the famed Brill Building, working alongside elite engineers, producers, and artists during one of the last great eras of New York studio culture. His music went on to be heard internationally across radio, major television networks and films including Cradle Will Rock, Sex and the City, PBS Great Performances, ESPN, MTV, and A&E Biography among many others. His work on The Guiding Light earned him an Emmy Award, while his long-running contributions to the Today Show — including the widely recognized theme "America's First Family" — brought Mobius, Golden Eagle, and New York Festivals honors. His co-written song "One Good Man," recorded by Sweet Sensation for Atlantic Records, reached #72 on the Billboard Hot 100, and later projects brought collaborations with Jose Feliciano, Debbie Harry, Martin Sexton, and L.A. Reid. He also discovered and developed the band Burnham, who he signed with Island Def..
Around 2012, Shehadi began a new chapter by moving his recording equipment and guitars to a renovated barn in the mountains of southern Vermont, overlooking the Pawlet/Rupert Valley. Far from the noise of New York and after decades spent serving other artists, productions, and media platforms, he turned fully toward his own artistic voice. In this new chapter, Fredi’s compositions and performances become an amalgamation of his influences over a forty year career, blending and bending into a musical fabric that feels not only deeply American, but multi-cultural and unmistakably personal. Rather than fitting neatly into traditional genre categories, Shehadi’s work lives somewhere between contemporary instrumental music, roots-based composition songwriting and storytelling through sound and words.
Whether performing solo, with an ensemble, or in multimedia listening-room settings that weave music and narrative, Shehadi approaches performance less as entertainment and more as lived musical conversation. It’s intimate, dynamic, humorous, and emotionally direct. After decades behind the scenes helping shape the sound of other artists and broadcasts, Fredi is now focused on the work that may be his most distinctive yet. Expect to feel as much as you hear from this dynamic artist.
