Kiesza performs during the 2014 Much Music Video Awards in Toronto on Sunday, June 15, 2014. With the one-shot, non-stop "Hideaway," Calgary's Kiesza introduced herself to the world with a fluttering tune and a ceaseless flurry of nimble footwork and she hasn't stopped moving since.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
With the one-shot, non-stop Hideaway, Calgary's Kiesza introduced herself to the world with a fluttering tune and a ceaseless flurry of nimble footwork – and it seems like she hasn't stopped moving since.
The song topped charts in Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Britain while reaching the Top 5 in many other places, including Canada, in the spring. Her debut album, Sound of a Woman, was completed fairly quickly before its release this week.
She's still writing songs for other artists, she contributed music to a 2015 Dreamworks film and she has designs on making her own cult flick eventually – not as a composer, but a filmmaker. Of course, that's joined by other potential pursuits, including a fashion line. A European tour is also imminently upcoming.
No longer an indie artist, Kiesza couldn't be blamed if she decided to delegate some responsibilities. Yet there she was recently touring possible settings for her second video, No Enemiesz.
"The producer just stopped for a minute and said: 'The artist never comes to the location scout. You realize this? If you have other things to do…'" Kiesza recalled during a recent interview in Toronto. "I'm like, 'no, I need to see the rooms.' I was involved in saying 'this is the room I want' and 'I want it to look this way.' 'And this is the section I'm dancing in here.'
"Sometimes the people, they don't give you that time for your art because they'd rather have you doing other things, more promo, but I put so much effort into the quality of my work. So for me, it's the most important thing that I put the time in and the preparation. The art is everything to me."
Aside from the years-in-the-works synth bath So Deep, these 13 songs came together very quickly – something Kiesza's comfortable with, given that breakout Hideaway was written during an hour-long ride to the airport.
That sleekly propulsive number leads off the album, and while its pop house lean generally hints at the sound of Woman, the record refuses to stay fixed in one place too long.
Hip hop crops up on the vamping Losin' My Mind and even more so on Bad Thing, a showcase for dexterous Brooklyn teen rapper Joey Badass, one of a series of genres Kiesza hopscotches through: soul, Chicago house, R&B and EDM.
"They all have a place in my mind from a similar era," she summarized.
That would be the nineties, when the 25-year-old was exposed to a variety of sounds
by her musically adventurous mother.
Some of Kiesza's earliest memories feature her mom hot-stepping around the kitchen while club music poured from the speakers.
"I don't know how she got into the whole Chicago house thing, because she's from Calgary – which is very much a country-music town," laughed Kiesza, born Kiesa Ellestad, reasoning that Michael Jackson was a gateway.
"I was really influenced by that," she added. Her upbringing was similarly marked by broad aptitude and a wandering interest. She trained as a ballerina young but hurt her knee, began sailing at 13 and worked on 40-metre-high boats at 16, and a year later joined the reserves of the Royal Canadian Navy, where she proved a crack shot.
She studied music at Selkirk College in B.C. before being granted a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston.
Her earliest compositions were simple and quiet.
"When I started writing music on the guitar, it started off very folky because of my limited ability to play," she said. "It was slow, soft melodies. But then as I got better on the guitar, I started exploring different sounds.
"And then writing Hideaway, which happened out of nowhere, and realizing this is so right, realizing that this is the music that's etched into my DNA, since being in the womb. It just flows out of me naturally."