🎧 We're showcasing submissions from South Florida for this year's NPR Tiny Desk Contest, which aims to amplify the work of independent musicians. Find past interviews with local musicians here.
Sofa.
That’s the word that helped dislodge Fabiola Canelon’s creative block.
When the singer-songwriter struggled with developing the melody for a song, she and her friend challenged themselves to improvise, by devising a song based on a random word.
In this case, it was something as ordinary as furniture.
”I really needed to create something, and I had no ideas — I had nothing, and that was a very good starting point,” she said.
What started as a creative exercise in musical improvisation became a hallmark of her performances — a quality that sets apart her Tiny Desk Contest submission. In fact, her song — ¿Pa Que Nos Hacemos Daño? or Why Do We Hurt Each Other, a fusion of pop, R&B and funk influences, was one actually born from improvisation.
And unlike other contestants, she chose to sing in front of a live audience, asking them for words to incorporate in her song.
“You cannot do a double take when there's people in front of you. And I wanted to show that. I'm not trying to make this perfect, I'm trying to make this real," she said.
Her musical style hearkens back to a traditional Venezuelan musical tradition called contrapunteo, in which two singers engage in musical sparring, marked by extemporaneous lyrics.
The adrenaline of live improvisation keeps her nimble and motivated in her artistic practice, but it also affirms her purpose as an artist — to form connections with people.
“It created this instant connection where it broke this barrier of the audience and the artist, like there’s this big wall where the artist is unattainable because they're on stage and I'm here,” she said.
Originally from Valencia, a city in Venezuela known for its vibrant music scene, Canelon moved to the U.S. when she was 14 years old. Later on, she attended an arts high school in South Florida, where she built her arts foundation.
READ MORE: South Florida musicians bring bold beats to NPR's Tiny Desk Contest
“ I don't think there was a point in my life where I wanted to be anything else other than this, a singer,” Canelon said.
Canelon’s charisma on stage also translates to her presence on social media.
With more than half a million followers on TikTok, Canelon wields her social media savvy to help build her own platform as an independent singer-songwriter. During the pandemic and long before she started performing, one of her videos in which she mimicked different accents gained 1.5 million views.
“ I was an 18-year-old girl trying to create some content, and I am good at doing accents in Spanish, so I started doing that just for fun, and turns out it became like this huge thing,” she said.
In a nod to those videos, her latest song, Idiomas, appropriately includes lyrics in different languages from Portuguese to French to German.
Fabiii chose to study music business, so she could learn the mechanics of the industry and gain a more holistic view of what it would mean to build a music career for herself. As an independent artist, that industry knowledge has become invaluable.
“My job as a singer is important," she explained, "but my job is nothing without the people that are surrounding that, right?”
At the same time, she makes an effort to extricate the business acumen from the creative process. Her number one rule: don’t chase trends. Instead, she aims to use her social media as a promotional vehicle.
“ I think that creativity needs to be respected as the art that it is. I don't think that we are able to plan a song out to be trendy 'cause then it loses its soul,” she said.
With production help from Helen Acevedo, Sherrilyn Cabrera and Valentina Sandoval.
