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‘It was anything but chill!’ Rising star Victoria Canal on performing with Coldplay – and what Tom Cruise taught her
A Glastonbury duet with Chris Martin shot her skyward. Now, the self-reflective singer’s debut album is a marvel of candid songwriting – too candid for some, she says
The pair met at Glastonbury and, such was the intensity of their blossoming friendship – Cruise flew her to a premiere in his helicopter, and gave her a tour of the Mission: Impossible set – that, by August, Canal was forced to deny she was the actor’s new squeeze. Kicking off with the fizzing bedroom pop of June Baby (a collaboration with two members of the 1975) only to segue into a compelling collection of anxiously melancholic confessionals, the album is about the “naive overconfidence” of youth being replaced by something “much more self-aware and introverted, which in my experience is what it feels like to get older”, says Canal. My piano-playing and guitar-playing is so specific to me because only I can really play that way.” She has been honing this unique skill set for decades, having found solace in music during an extremely peripatetic childhood; born in Munich to an American mother and Spanish father, she lived everywhere from Tokyo to Dubai, before studying jazz in Barcelona and singing in Atlanta in her teens (she’s still on the move, having recently relocated from London to LA).
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