Kiesza: Back in the Saddle

Audience members shouldn’t be surprised if Kiesza, the internationally celebrated dance-pop artist best known for her infectious and inescapable 2014 hit song Hideaway sheds a tear or two when she takes the stage with the Calgary Philharmonic this fall. The multi-talented singer-songwriter will be preforming songs from her new EP Dancing and Crying Vol. One — so, tears would certainly fit the material’s theme. Beyond that, this special performance represents a homecoming for the former Calgarian who has long dreamed of performing from the stage of the Jack Singer Concert Hall. After a decade marked by tremendous success and heartbreaking challenges, the triumphant performance will likely elicit at least a few tears of joy, from both the artist and her fans in the audience.

“Playing with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra is amazing because it’s bringing me back to my hometown for a dream experience,” says Kiesza, whose full name is Kiesa Rae Ellestad. “I’ve always wanted to play with an orchestra, but it’s even more special that it’s in Calgary because I’m returning to my roots. There’s a lot of hometown energy.”

Keisza’s return to Calgary for such a high-profile collaboration is particularly momentous because it was only a few years ago that the artist wasn’t sure if she’d be able to ever perform again, let alone with the backing of a full professional orchestra. In 2017 her career was on a meteoric upswing after the success of Hideaway, her debut album Sound of a Woman, and a pair of wins at the 2015 Juno Awards. Her future as a globally renowned artist was blindingly bright, until a ride share vehicle she was a passenger in was involved in a significant accident in Toronto. Initially the artist thought she had emerged from the accident relatively unscathed, but within the next few days it became apparent she’d suffered a traumatic brain injury.

The complex injury was devastating, both mentally and physically. Symptoms, including balance issues, the inability to focus, nausea, and intense fatigue, continued to worsen for the next six months and it took her years to recover to the point that she could resume regular activities. Kiesza was barely able to move or think, let alone record or perform in front of an audience. Dancing — a reliable comfort she’d enjoyed for most of her life — was absolutely out of the question. It was an excruciating recovery for someone who had always turned to music and movement to soothe herself, given that all the things that had always made her feel like her singular self were suddenly a source of pain and discomfort. She did manage to record an album, her sophomore record Crave, in 2020, but was not able to fully process or express the trauma of her life-changing injury through the creation of those songs.

While Kiesza is proud of the work she did on Crave and believes that album’s positive vibes were well-timed with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, she says the new Dancing and Crying EP is her first true artistic exploration of life post-brain injury. The EP’s six songs bubble over with a combination of joy and pain — there is no shortage of danceable beats, but the music also takes Kiesza back to her days as a folky singer-songwriter and recalls her initial emergence in Calgary in the mid-2000s, playing local open mic shows. Experiencing a split-second accident that nearly cost her not only her career but also her life made room for much introspection and a desire to fully open herself up artistically. As an inherently upbeat person she couldn’t help but inject a sense of fun through the music and the beats, but, lyrically, the content of Dancing and Crying is deeply personal and emotionally complex.

“I missed the side of myself that allowed for more poetic lyrics and being a storyteller. After Hideaway I was really leaning into the dance scene and trying to fit into that lane,” she says. “I put the two together for Dancing and Crying. There are really no rules now — I’m in my own playground and I’m just having a good time making music that is fun to make. Since I didn’t think I’d be able to dance again after the car crash, I came back with an explosion of dance music.”

Those dual sides of Kiesza — the singer-songwriter and the dance floor queen — are bolstered by a personal history that involved studying traditional dance forms in her youth as well as classical music training at both Selkirk College in British Columbia and the Berklee College of Music in Boston. This formal education, which included studies in orchestration, make her a prime candidate for a collaboration with the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. Performing with an orchestra — any orchestra — has long been a dream for Kiesza (she jokes “Believe me, the only reason I don’t work with an orchestra all the time is because I literally can’t afford to hire one”). Getting to perform with her hometown orchestra came through a particularly serendipitous turn of events.

“The day before I got the invitation from the Philharmonic I was really intensely thinking about a vision of creating a dance symphony,” she says. “I messaged my manager to say I really wanted to work with an orchestra to make a dance symphony version of Dancing and Crying one day. The next day we got a message from the Calgary Philharmonic asking if I wanted to collaborate. I don’t know if I was just having some weird psychic premonitions or if it was just the biggest coincidence ever.”

Since Kiesza and the orchestra were already on the same page as far as wanting to work together, coming up with a concept for the performance was easy. The performer and Calgary Philharmonic Assistant Concertmaster Donovan Seidle set to write out scores for all six songs on Dancing and Crying Vol. 1 as well as a smattering of other key jams including Hideaway. The delicious dance quality and beats signature of Kiesza’s sound will remain, with majestic amplification from the orchestra’s musicians. She’s also employing the help of her former Selkirk College music instructor Gilles Parenteau, who will be performing alongside her with his famed ‘virtual symphony’ keyboard set-up. Going in, Kiesza can only envision what the performance will sound like through the aid of synthesized instrumentation, but she’s confident the result will be goosebump-inducing once the analog instruments come in.

“With an orchestra you have some of the top musicians in the world who are constantly playing and now I have this opportunity to work with dozens of them,” she says. “It’s an honour. I’m truly honored to be among such incredible players and to have an opportunity to play my own music with so many of them.”

The prospect of coming home and being on stage at Jack Singer Concert Hall, where she saw so many concerts in her youth, is also not lost on Kiesza. The Singer family are friends of her own family, so that in itself is a thrill, but she’s also elated to realize this particular dream in the city where her career started. She still has family in Calgary she hopes can attend and knows that the hometown crowd will be excited to see her play such a significant show in a place where she still has deep roots even after spending the bulk of her adulthood in cities such as Toronto and Los Angeles.

“I just think back to my days of dreaming and not knowing if I’d ever make it as a professional musician,” she says. “To think that I’m coming home and playing in the Jack Singer Concert Hall, which I went to my whole life for so many different performances, is really special. I’ve never performed on that stage. For me it’s a teenage bucket list moment.”

Ultimately, Kiesza is constantly redefining who she is as an artist, both by necessity after her car accident and by choice as she evolves as a human being. To listeners who may only know her as the artist behind the Hideaway video, the announcement she would be preforming with the Calgary Philharmonic may have come as a surprise. But as she reveals her sensitivity, musicality, and unique point of view, it’s clear this collaboration is a perfect match that will delight both the existing Kiesza fanbase and loyal Calgary Philharmonic audiences. Music is music, and this dance symphony proves that strings and horns are truly for everyone. With several more volumes of Dancing and Crying in the works, Kiesza hopes this collaboration is just the beginning of her work with the orchestra.

“Any kind of artist can play with an orchestra,” she says. “We like to put up these walls and put ourselves in these boxes. For so many years people have separated themselves, but there’s so much mixing of genres and fusion now. Bringing modern music to the symphony is such a great way to keep the door open to new generations.”