Image Courtesy of Isobel Timms.
The late afternoon sun fell upon the trees, an orange glow emerged in the air. A gentle wind brushed against my skin. I sat on the grass by the stage listening to Rita Vian perform – the Lisbon-born singer who is floating in a place between traditional fado and fresh electronic music. Eyes closed, I try to decipher what she might be saying (she sings in Portuguese) but soon give up and decide to instead listen to the emotions radiating from her voice.
Rita sings with what I can only describe as a tender strength. She is incredibly empowering, even for someone who doesn’t speak her language, yet she treads delicately with care.
“In my music, I talk about experiences in life and how much they affect your brain. My songs are about emotions, and being aware of actions and feelings, how they affect both you and others,” she tells me later, when I meet her in her trailer. Outside, the sounds of techno shake and pulsate, vibrating the little container in which we sit. “I like to call it conscious music. It’s a wish to be vulnerable. It’s a wish for music to be a space of honesty, a real conversation of what is happening in my mind. It’s a way for me to make sense, to release the overthinking and let it come out”.
Image Courtesy of Isobel Timms.
Rita’s musical expressions can be traced to her family – who all loved music. She then studied journalism at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, but soon realised that what she really loved was to use words as freely as a poet. She spent the pandemic recording herself singing and then she was soon picked up by Branko who ended up producing her first 5-track EP, CAOS’A. After that, she went on to have great public and media recognition that took her to many stages across Europe. Two years back, she released her debut album “SENSOREAL” in which she explores various dimensions such as composition, writing, production, and image. Armed with the “word as the weapon”, Rita is understanding her own inner thoughts and feelings with poetic grace.
“One of the chorus that you heard, but didn’t understand, was ‘whose crazy idea was it to put me here today?’. At the end of the day, I’m just someone who wants to talk and share and have a relationship with someone’s eyes to see if you felt it too. In the end, we all have a story to share.”
It’s these stories and self realisations that sit at the core of her music that feel inherent to her cultural identity. Being based in Lisbon, she is very much influenced by the traditional style of music that’s prevalent here – Fado. Fado is a traditional form of Portuguese music that is focused on engaging deeply with emotions through sombre melodies and lyrical themes of love and loss.
Image Courtesy of Isobel Timms.
“It’s the song that always brings a tear in your eyes,” Rita sums it up as, and in a sense it really is just that. “It’s really about the soul, and touching something very deep in there. I think what is special about being in Lisbon is that people are very soulful here. There’s a cultural way of being that is really about an ongoing search for the soul. Sometimes we can get a little down under (laughs)…but I think it’s quite a special way of being in the world.”
And that’s really what music should be, right? Some form of expression of the soul, an extension of subconsciousness. A way in which to navigate thoughts, feelings, emotions.
“It’s a work in progress how much you decide to share part of yourself. In the beginning, you write things that are a little enigmatic. But then you slowly get closer and closer to the truth. For someone who is very much inside her head like me, it’s very much a process. But I have the freedom to say and do whatever I am feeling. It’s an endless process. I’ll never fully have it figured out,” she tells me. “The process of self-understanding is endless, it’ll always be an ongoing conversation with myself. My feelings will always change and move. The water will always keep flowing.”