Uruguayan-born singer-songwriter Valeria Matzner walked into
the studio with a book full of ideas. But she had no idea what final shape they
would take. “Twenty minutes before the recording session, I announced that I
had an idea and want to work on it. Our engineer was so patient with me. I
wanted it to be very soft and tender. South American singing is not about
showing off your instrument, your technique, it’s about singing the damn song,”
Matzner states. “I don’t want to show I have a pretty voice. I want to tell a
story.”
Matzner went in and nailed it, crafting the tender ballad
“Amor y Soledad.” The track channels vulnerable sway and intimate appeal of
Anima (release: May 16, 2018), Matzner’s first solo album and first recording
after immigrating to Canada and diving into jazz. The Montevideo native
explores the softer side of her musical soul, filtered through a firm
commitment to songwriting and a new-found perspective on her South American
past.
“A lot of the songs on this album took a lot of reaching to
write. I found myself able to write faster, upbeat songs easily. But writing
ballads, I resisted that,” she muses. “I had to embrace the tender and
vulnerable part of me. In this part of my life, I’m getting more in
Matzner’s music wasn’t always so gentle in its approach.
Though she grew up with classical training, singing as a chorister in the
national choir, she and a friend would slip away from rehearsal to hang out
with the guys at a local record store, asking for mixtapes. Matzner soon added
hard rock and punk to the Latin, tango, and Brazilian music she heard her
parents play at home.
When the Seattle sound swept the world thanks Nirvana and
Pearl Jam, Matzner knew what she had to do. She started her own band, Blue
Angel, with friends. Playing in a band meant writing your own songs: “If you
played someone else’s music, you were considered a fake. You weren’t
contributing anything,” recounts Matzner. “I showed some ideas that I had to a
friend of mine, and I started writing my own music.” Over time, the band’s
sound morphed to incorporate more local elements--even Ecuadorian folk
music--into the grunge.
It was tough to earn respect as a female bandleader, but
Matzner did it. The band played all over, from small holes in the wall to big
festivals, even at SXSW. Then Matzner fell in love, married a fan, and wound up
in a remote part of northern British Columbia. She found her music career on
hold in her new homeland and her identity shifting as she adjusted slowly to
life in Canada.
After some years, some heartbreak, and some moving around,
Matzner found music calling her again. This time, she decided to pursue
training in jazz. “I decided to go to music school,” says Matzner. “I got into
something new, jazz and electronic music composition. Electronic music guided
me in ways you may not hear at first,” but that pop in intriguing ways in
Anima’s production choices, including an unexpected cover of Radiohead deep
cut, “Lotus Flower.”
Jazz did, too, and its impact is readily apparent (“Illusion”).
Yet as with rock, Matzner did not want to stick with singing standards. She
began to write her own songs, eventually finding pianist and songwriter Scott
Metcalfe to collaborate with. Matzner and Metcalfe both had a long history of
writing across genres and styles. Together, they captured a variety of moments,
sounds, and beats, like the feel of a newly democratic, musically bubbling
Buenos Aires in “Contemporaineo,” where Matzner spent several years as a young
woman.
They discovered ways to pay tribute to Matzner’s love of
Brazil and its many musical styles. Portuguese often intermingles with Spanish
in her lyrics, or inspires entire songs, like the beautiful “Lua Cheia.” A
late-night swim in Rio with the lights of the city shimmering on the waves
sparked “Cor,” which weaves together two different Brazilian rhythms. “It’s
about finding peace in the water,” Matzner explains. “I wanted to stay there
and never come out and just find peace in the current, submerging myself and
looking at the colors.”
Reaching into South American sounds came naturally to
Matzner as part of her ongoing adjustment to life in a new, very different
country. “I realized I was getting deeper into my roots as I worked more and
more in jazz,” recounts Matzner. “Musical exploration and memory became a way
of finding myself more and more in a culture.” Digging deep also meant
surfacing an emotionally tense tenderness in songs like “For My Father,” a song
connected to Matzner’s restored connection to her father as an adult.
These intense subjects and stories channelled with a gentle
touch are steps toward a new, more mature songwriting style, an achievement
honored by a recent Global Music Award. Songs like “Broken Landscapes” point in
this direction: “I’m drawn more and more to a philosophical way of looking at
things and writing songs,” muses Matzner. “It’s painful to have to dig into
yourself for inspiration. It’s very self-absorbed. I want to sing more
outwardly, about stories outside of me.” Matzner instead strives to sing about
the world, via the lens of a resonant soul, to the beat of the Latin pulse she
imbibed from childhood.
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