Kiesza is nostalgic for a time she never knew

    1 of 2 2 of 2

      Listeners have found Kiesza’s music to be a tad on the retro side, and she’s okay with that. In reviewing the singer’s breakthrough LP—the multiple-Juno winner Sound of a WomanSpin’s Brennan Carley called it “one of the most elastic albums of the 1990s”, while the Guardian compared it to “Top of the Pops in 1992”.

      The Calgary-born performer, who had a sizable hit last year with “Hideaway”—showcasing both her powerhouse pipes and her affinity for house beats—presumably takes comparisons to the likes of CeCe Peniston and Lisa Stansfield as high praise.

      “I like to call my style a sort of throwback to the future,” Kiesza says with a laugh when the Straight connects with her at a tour stop in Las Vegas. “I like to take throwback sounds and make them modern. That’s not necessarily what I’m going for all the time, but with my last album I was paying homage to the ’90s era that I really love and grew up with, but taking it to a more fresh, modern place.”

      The artist formerly known as Kiesa Rae Ellestad admits that her callbacks to a bygone era might be lost on her younger fans. The singer, who was born in 1989, notes that even she doesn’t remember when tracks like “Finally” and “What Is Love?” ruled the dance floor.

      “The early ’90s was even a little before my time, because I was a baby in the early ’90s,” she says. “My mom was the one who kept that era playing in our household, because she still loved it. That’s why I had that influence. I feel like what happened, sort of unintentionally, was that a lot of people felt nostalgia from some of the music I was making, whereas a lot of the younger kids, it was brand-new to them. They’d never heard it before, so they felt like they had a whole new sound, whereas other people felt nostalgic from their past. So it drew in quite a broad audience.”

      That audience is expanding all the time, thanks in part to Kiesza’s collaborations with other artists. She’s the featured vocalist on “Take U There”, the debut single from Jack Ü (aka superstar producers Diplo and Skrillex), for example, and she sings on the Joey Bada$$ cut “Teach Me”. She recently worked on a new song with Duran Duran, and a couple of numbers she wrote are in consideration for the next Rihanna album.

      Not bad for someone who hasn’t always seen making music full-time as a career goal. In fact, Kiesza joined the Royal Canadian Navy at 17, honing skills as a code breaker and a marksman. (She has stated in the past that her aversion to killing her fellow humans put the kibosh on any aspirations of becoming a sniper.)

      “I didn’t know if I would succeed at it,” she says of pursuing life as a tunesmith and performer. “The moment I started songwriting, specifically on the guitar, actually, was when I realized that I had sort of a natural intuition for songwriting. And I loved it. It came sort of effortlessly, and it was very therapeutic for me, and I felt like it also gave something to other people. I felt a sense of purpose when I wrote music. And when I felt that sense of purpose, I felt like that was really important, and I should follow through with that.”

      Kiesza plays the Commodore Ballroom on Monday (April 20).

      Comments