Next Wave #670: Connie Constance

A raw talent with exciting possibilities...

“I'm kind of like, No Fixed Abode on paper.”

Connie Constance is nothing if not honest. Delivered with a wry grin, it's clear that she actually relishes the freedom she's given – and in life, so too in music. Originally a dancer, the London-based artist became more and more engrossed in the music that made her move, until she began writing songs of her own.

“Me and my friends used to just jam and play guitar in the house,” she recalls. “Obviously, being a student you're pretty broke, so I had a lot to write about. I've written poems all my life, that I can remember. And then I started singing them.”

A chance encounter at a warehouse party took Connie Constancee into the orbit of Blue Daisy, a producer known for his intense take on bass saturation. In reality a genial soul, the producer immediately struck up a friendship with this then-unknown singer. “I had already quit dance school by then,” she explains. “I don't know what I was planning to do. Luckily, the universe or whatever hooked me up with him. A my friend introduced me. Then we played him some stuff – I had two poorly recorded tunes on SoundCloud. We played them to him and we started working on material that night, actually.”

A feverish, continually creative individual, Connie Constance swiftly pieced together her debut EP. Writing to beats, the singer pushed herself further and further. Now plotting her second EP, the singer is launching a multi-media project with friends – oh, and she's also planning to write a novel. “It just takes so long. You have to build up all the characters and it's a never-ending story, you don't know how it's going to end. It feels like it's going to go on forever!” she laughs. “I'm a notepad geek! I buy a new notepad every month, if I'm not broke.”

Right now, though, Connie Constance is ready to explore music. She's work on a live project, while the singer is only just beginning to define her own voice. Eager to stamp out her identity, she's conscious of a burning desire to sound only like herself. “I remember I never thought I could sing when I was growing up,” she admits. “I was like, oh I'd love to be Beyonce but I can't sing! And then slowly and slowly I started listening to more covers, and I'd listen to how people adapt songs to sound differently and that would drive me insane. It was amazing how different voices could make them sound.”

“So basically I think that's how I found my voice,” she says, “because I was like, how can I make this sound like me? And no one else. I wanted to make it sound like something no one else could do. So that's how I found my voice, whatever that is.”

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