All her life, she sang other people’s songs. Now Sheila Dardashti is releasing her own music for the first time.

Sheila Dardashti has spent her lifetime making music — but until recently had never written any of her own.

Raised in Queens by Jewish lovers of folk music, Dardashti studied classical guitar in high school. As a young woman, she toured as half of an international folk music duo with her husband, Farid Dardashti, who had been a teen idol in his native Iran. Later, with Farid working as a cantor and Sheila as teacher, the couple incorporated show tunes into their act and performed around the country with their three daughters as The Dardashti Family.

And now, the 78-year-old grandmother of seven is embarking on a brand-new musical journey: She’s just released her first-ever album, and it consists entirely of songs she wrote herself.

“Build Me a Home” is Dardashti’s loving tribute to her musical Jewish family — all of whom appear on the album. That includes her daughters Danielle and Galeet, the creators of an award-winning podcast, “The Nightingale of Iran,” about their paternal grandfather, who had been a famous singer of Persian classical music before fleeing the country, and their youngest child, Michelle, who is the “radically pluralist” rabbi at Kane Street Synagogue in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

On Sunday, Dardashti and her tribe — including her grandchildren, who range in age between 9 and 24 — will perform an album release concert at Beth El Synagogue center in New Rochelle.

“This is really our home,” Dardashti said about the decision to premiere the album at the Conservative synagogue, where her now-retired husband was the cantor for 14 years. “We have a lot of friends there, but it’s more than that — it’s just a feeling of being at home.”

That feeling is part and parcel of the album, in which each of the 10 songs — the first songs that Dardashti wrote herself — are inspired by her family members. While Dardashti was always known for writing clever parodies for loved ones’ birthdays, the motivation to try her hand at songwriting grew out of the isolation she experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I think the variables that were happening, maybe there was some anger, the craziness in the politics, there was some longing for not seeing my family,” said Dardashti, explaining that she in her husband were in their winter home in Delray Beach, Florida, when the pandemic began. “I missed everybody — but it was more than that. The whole world was longing for each other, right? And I think maybe all that bottled up energy, I figured, what the heck?”

Later, when Dardashti and her husband were back in New York, the extended family gathered at their eldest daughter’s Westchester County home for a backyard bonfire on a bitter cold December evening. There, Dardashti pulled out her guitar and debuted two original songs: one written for Farid, and the other written for the daughter, Danielle.

“I got immediate feedback: Everybody started singing harmony,” Dardashti recalled. “The warmth from the music that we sang way overshadowed the warmth from the fire and the heat lamps.”

Inspired, Danielle’s husband, Roni, said to Dardashti: “Why don’t you write a song for each of us, and we’ll record them and make an album?”

Over the course of the next four years, that’s exactly what Dardashti did.

“I think I needed a challenge,” she said. “I needed something that was kind of concrete.”

With Roni’s challenge at the top of mind, “Now I was looking for the characteristics of the people in my family,” she added. “With each song I wrote, the song took on its own life.”

For example, the album’s title track, “Build Me a Home,” was inspired by Nathan, Michelle’s husband, who is a homebuilder. The song starts about building a literal home — “Build me a home, where the trees reach the sun,” she sings — but the lyrics soon expand to Dardashti’s hopes for a world without violence and fear, “where there will be enough love to go around, and lost dreams will be found.”

Two songs on the album are dedicated to her grandchildren — including “Earth, Trees and Sky,” which is inspired by their brown, green, and blue eyes — and two are about Farid; each of the other six tracks are about their daughters and their husbands.

“Build Me a Home” marks the first time that Dardashti has stepped into the spotlight as a singer. “I’m really not a singer — I didn’t get the Dardashti genes,” said Dardashti, who credits her husband as being a true musical talent. Galeet Dardashti, who produced “Build Me a Home,” has followed in his footsteps, last year releasing “Monajat,” an album of Persian High Holiday songs in which she incorporates samples of her late grandfather’s singing.

“I kept saying, ‘Galeet, you should do the vocals on the track; I’ll sing here and there.’ But they all said, ‘No, you sing the vocal track, and then we’ll chime in,” Sheila Dardashti said.

“My 78-year-old mom is such a badass for writing such incredibly beautiful and poetic songs at this stage of her life,” Galeet Dardashti said in an email. “Producing this album with my Mom felt particularly epic and was one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done.”

“I’m singing a little more than I think I would have wanted to, but I kind of got roped into this,” Sheila Dardashti added, noting that the album’s songs were arranged by violinist, composer and arranger Megan Gould, whom Dardashti credits with turning her “10 simple folk songs” into “three-dimensional ultra-color.”

“I consider them all very Jewish,” Dardashti said of the album’s 10 songs. “Everything about love, and everything about empathy and everything about justice and no fear in this world, to me, it’s Jewish. It has neshama — it has the heart, it has the soul.”

Sheila Dardashti’s album release concert of “Build Me A Home” will take place on Sunday, April 6 at New Rochelle’s Beth El Synagogue Center (1324 North Ave.) at 7 p.m. For tickets and additional information, click here.