Victoria Canal

When Victoria Canal returned to her family home in Amsterdam for the pandemic, the 23-year-old singer,
songwriter, producer and activist had just finished a tour after a period of busy music-making in the studio
– something she’s been doing since she was a teenager. Born in Munich to Spanish and American parents,
Victoria lived a nomadic existence, travelling across the world with her parents and siblings, living
everywhere from Shanghai, Tokyo and Amsterdam to Dubai and Atlanta. In between the travelling, she
studied music in Barcelona and New York – including a stint under legendary voice coach Jan Smith,
who’d worked with the likes of Drake and Usher.
Lockdown was the first time Victoria had spent an extended time in one place and she retreated to the
basement, setting up a make-shift studio to record. “It was a very stripped-back set up,” Victoria recalls
from her home in London, where she now lives. “I ended up writing all these songs and singing quite
quietly into my mic, not wanting the rest of my family to hear,” she smiles, saying things got a little
crowded: as well as her parents, her two siblings also returned home when the world shut down. “My
voice actually changed over the course of the year through this,” she laughs. “I used to sing really loud
but over lockdown, I became more hushed. I changed the way I approached recording music.”
There was another reason Victoria’s powerful voice was more muted too. When she entered the basement
to write the songs that now make up her upcoming EP, Elegy, she was certain these deeply personal and
emotive tracks would never be heard by anyone at all. With news that a close relative was sick with
incurable cancer, Victoria wrote the songs as a means to explore her own feelings of sorrow, helplessness
and the anticipatory grief that comes with knowing a loved one won’t recover from a terminal illness.
“It was a very inward process and nobody else was involved in the writing,” Victoria says of this solitary
time where she retreated into her music as a means to cope. “I was so weighed down by the insane weight
of uncertainty and grief, not to mention the sadness at what they were going through, the suffering, the
pain. Initially when I wrote the songs, they were so raw, honest and so painfully real, I was just certain I
wouldn’t show them to anyone at all.”
When she finished writing the songs, Victoria says she realised she had a complete “body of work”, but
still wasn’t sure about sharing them at a time when she was still processing the news about her relative. In
lockdown, she’d started an online series called ‘Mellow Tunes’ – songs composed in just five minutes –
both as a means to keep creating at a time when live music was at a standstill, and as a way to cope with
what was happening to her relative. One of the clips found its way to Coldplay’s Chris Martin. A year
later when lockdown lifted, he invited Victoria to record at his studio. Chris introduced Victoria to
Parlophone and soon after, she signed a deal with the renowned label.
“I was like Chris Martin’s biggest fan way before this,” Victoria laughs. “I’ve grown up with Coldplay
and every time I’ve sat down at my piano over the last ten years, I’ve always asked myself: ‘What would
Chris Martin do?!’” Martin became Victoria’s mentor and encouraged her to be more open and honest in
her songwriting or “encouraging me to be me,” as she puts it. Another mentor came in the shape of Jon
Hopkins whose studio she now regularly works at in London. “Even though our styles are completely
different, he also encouraged me to be authentic, to be myself and that’s what I’ve tried to do with this
EP.”
After thinking how to let more of herself over into her music, Victoria decided to share the personal songs
she’d written in her basement. “Over lockdown I’d read books by people like Elena Ferrante and Isabelle
Allende, both of whom had written a lot of literature about family, loss and what happens when people
pass away. Those books helped me to get through that difficult period and I started to understand more
about how art can help a person struggling with grief.” Victoria decided to share her songs in the hope
they might speak to people who were going through similar.
The first song, ‘Own Me’, is a vulnerable piano-driven track that explores feelings of anger when
someone we love is being taken away for no apparent reason. “The principle of this song is a reckoning of
sorts,” Victoria explains. “Someone’s been an amazing person their whole life and then for no logical
reason whatsoever, their life is taken away. It’s about bad things happening to good people and the song
also asks the question: how much are we really in control, verses how much we really are pawns? There’s
some quiet anger here,” she says, which is perhaps most apparent at the song’s soaring string-driven
crescendo.
The EP’s second track, the stripped-back acoustic-guitar led ‘Pity Season’ takes the listener inside a
conversation between her sick relative and his son over dinner, where he breaks the news about his illness
to the family. “Now you’re talking, making better sense…It’s Pity Season, what a funny way to live,”
Victoria sings on the gut-wrenching track. “…And the nerve to mention over dinner you’ve got a year to
live.” She says the song was one of the most challenging to write on the EP. “They’re all at the dinner
table and the song is told from the kid’s perspective,” Victoria explains. “It’s their perspective of ‘What
the hell is going on?’ as they try to make sense of a terrible situation.”
Part of the song also sees the son exploring how he measures up next to his father. “It’s that fear of a loss
of identity when the son wonders ‘How can I be like you, measure up to you, if you’re not around for me
to observe and follow your lead?’”, Victoria says, acknowledging that she did similar herself when she
heard the news about her family member. “The song eventually sees the parent assuming the strong role:
they are there for their child once more.”
This leads onto ‘Swan Song’, a haunting piano ballad that results in the acceptance of the illness – from
the father and the rest of the family. “It’s the last words between a father and a son and it comes from a
place of peace and acceptance. I think this one is the most special to me on the EP,” Victoria continues, “I
think it is the most special to me on the EP because it somehow captures the essence of my relative the
most,” she explains.
This song, like the last on the EP – the delicately layered ‘Driving UR Car’ – are written much more from
Victoria’s perspective and capture what she says is her “lack of life experience when it comes to dealing
with loss and grief.” She explains: “My relative is still thankfully here. It’s been a slow decline and
talking about grief, or writing about it, is confusing because it’s the anticipation of it that is so challenging
to deal with. It’s a strange no-man’s land of emotion.”
Victoria compares it back to her earlier work, like that when she was supporting Leslie Odom Junior on
his tour just before the pandemic. “My show was really sort of fun and dynamic” she says, recalling how
her merch would sell out each night to audiences of 2000 or more fans who would enjoy her buoyant
show. “But it just wasn’t deep,” she says of her work back then. “The pandemic and the experience with
my family member cracked me open as a songwriter – everything about me and them is in those songs. I
came to realise that the songs I was scared to show people were the ones that connected with people the
most.”
It’s also married her life away from music more with her career. When not making music, Victoria is a
passionate activist for the disabled (Victoria was born with one arm) as well as women and the LGBTQ+
communities as a queer musician. Now, she’s finding away to include this side of her life with her art too.
“The last two music videos I made, the child actor playing me has a tiny arm like me and I’m hoping to be
able to include people with limb differences like mine, as well as others with disabilities too, so we keep
increasing the presence of those with disabilities in society.” Victoria says growing up without seeing
such visibility was tough.
“There was nobody who looked like me on screen,” she says. “It was the same not just with that but with
women, and queer women too. In my latest video, I have women, trans and non-binary actors in the parts
as well as more people of colour. I didn’t see anyone like me in the public eye as a teenager, and I think
being that person for someone else might be really cool. In terms of my queerness, it’s all just about being
open about who I am, throwing away any labels that might be restrictive in the hope that might empower
or inspire others to do the same.”
For now, she wants to turn those basement sessions into a new career blueprint that sees her being the
most honest and open she can be. “I’m trying to be the most authentically version of me I can be,” she
smiles. “I’m excited to see what part of me I’ll be able to share next.”11pm