Sandra Bouza - Falling Away From Me (2020)

R&B/pop singer Sandra Bouza has a lot to offer through her music and
life experience. On her introductory EP, Three Years, produced by Hill
Kourkoutis (SATE, Jules), the Toronto native who has lived, studied or
worked all over the world, lets her stories breathe in songs that are
deeply personal. Her full length album "Falling Away From Me" was
released on February 14 2020 and is available here.

The album’s eight tracks together build on the deep grooves of her
previous EP Three Years, showing off Sandra’s sultry, soulful vocals.
But what really shines through, on standout tracks such as “Almost
Love,” “Losing You” and “East Side Woman,” is Sandra’s ability to
lyrically examine relationships from all angles—from the thrill of
discovery to the fallout of poor decisions. These are songs rooted in
hard-earned experience, a badge of honour Sandra wears with pride.

“I thought I had to give up music, but when I reached sobriety I got
this offer to work in this beautiful country full-time doing music and
that’s where I did a lot of my healing,” says Sandra of her three
years in Morocco, starting in 2015. “It was a gift, and then to be
able to come back to Toronto and work on these songs and recordings,
that was a gift too.”

In her youth, Sandra spent five months every other year in Spain,
where her father was from and her mother would homeschool her children
up in the mountains. As for music, she says, “Mom was
the foundation of my musical education. She was always singing and
playing guitar and encouraging us to sing. She had a great record
collection and constantly had the radio on, drilling
us about who was playing and was always taking us to concerts and
musicals.”

While they didn’t have a piano, Sandra leaned how to play using a hand
drawn keyboard on a piece of paper, and by the time she was given a
Casio keyboard at age 10, she was ready. She and her sister regularly
performed for family and neighbours, and at age 11 were offered $100
to play three songs at La Contessa Ballroom in Toronto. She wrote her
first original song in grade 6.


At 19, while at school in Hamilton, Ontario, Sandra played coffee
shops and continued performing when she relocated to Guelph. But she
hadn’t yet decided to pursue music as a career; in fact, she next went
to St. Andrews University in Scotland to get her Masters in Museum
Studies. Not surprisingly, her second week there she met a guy on the
beach playing guitar, and they started playing in a 10-piece soul-funk
band. She also played solo in the town of Dundee. “I was still
pursuing museum work, but more of my heart was in music,” she says.
There are interesting parallels in songwriting. “There are so many
stories of everyday people in all of these old artifacts. There’s a
story in everything, and how you interpret that story is unique. How
an artist interprets their story can connect to thousands of people
who live totally different lives and in artifacts same thing — people
thousands of years later can still feel connected to that person as a
human.”

Sandra next ended up in Vancouver. No real reason except “Toronto was
cold,” she laughs. While there, she made her first EP, Kingdom on the
Run, in 2010, but it wasn’t a good experience. “When I recorded that,
I was in addiction years. The producer pigeonholed me into a Canadiana
folk artist, which is not what I wanted, but I was too young and
inexperienced, and I couldn’t speak up for myself.”

She then returned to Toronto, where she fronted an original funky-rock
band Redbrick in 2012 and gigged tirelessly for a few years. But in
2015, just one month into sobriety, Sandra got a referral to go to
Morocco to play music. It was supposed to be for six weeks, but it
became three years, playing rock, blues, and top 40, as well as her
favourite jazz and pop duo gigs with Brooklyn, NY transplant Kevin
Cummings, “my musical brain twin.”