When artist and producer Carriesa writes music, she focuses on her own experiences in life and what she’s dealing with at the time – often taken straight from the pages of a diary.
When artist and producer Carriesa writes music, she focuses on her own experiences in life and what she’s dealing with at the time – often taken straight from the pages of a diary.
That was even the theme of the nine-track album she released last year, Blue Diaries, which featured songs like “You’re Perfect,” “False Reality” and “Wasting My Time.” Carriesa calls that project a compilation of her diaries growing up.
“I just turned them into songs,” she says.
Her newest single, “Radar,” is another very personal effort from the Houston native, who asks God: “Am I on your radar?” It’s a song three years in the making.
“At the time I was going through a dark time in my life,” Carriesa says. “I was talking with a songwriter and he came up with the chorus of the song, but I just put it on the back burner. Stuff hit again last year and I went back into that dark place, that depressive state. I took the song off the back burner and felt it was the right time to release it.”
“I think with everything going on in the world, it’s a good message for people to hear,” she says. “It’s okay to be vulnerable, you don’t always have to put up a wall or a front. It’s okay to be not okay, we’re human.”
It’s a song full of dark emotion, and Carriesa says she had no plans to release it after recording it. But she let a few people listen and they all insisted she needed to put it out there, so she relented.
“It was more therapeutic than anything,” she says.
Carriesa grew up in church, the daughter of a preacher, and says she’s centered and grounded in Christianity and the gospel.
“So I’ve always been taught that you were overcome by the words of your testimony,” she says. “I feel like people need to hear my story and the things I’ve been through. God takes us through these journeys for a reason and I think that’s the reason, to help other people. That’s what made me transition in that (Blue Diaries) phase. I realized I’m going through all this stuff for a reason, I’m not just being tortured. People need to hear this.”
She started releasing music in 2018 and worked with singer-songwriter Kenneth Clark, who helped on “Radar” in 2019. Around the same time she lost her record label, which took her into an even darker place and contributed to the emotions in “Radar.”
Her story with music goes back further, though, to her childhood when she grew up exposed to virtually every genre, not just gospel and Christian music. She listened to R&B, pop, even country and rock.
“Especially punk rock, I grew up listening to a lot of that,” she says. “I like dark pop. My favorite artists are Coldplay, Billie Eilish, Brandi, Toni Braxton. With me growing up listening to those genres and growing up in a multicultural town, it helped me mold my sound into more of a universal sound, the way I like to put it.”
She started playing piano by the age of four and later used a tape recorder to capture her playing. Within a few years she was playing in church services, and she still does today. Carriesa later went to MediaTech Institute and learned engineering, songwriting, videography, voice overs and more.
Right now she’s in a creative phase and has been producing for other artists and working on an album she’ll release early next year.
Make sure to stay connected to Carriesa on all platforms for new music, videos and social posts.
Websites:
carriesa
YouTube
Soundcloud
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