Written by: Oliver Heffron
Alicia Creti has a special voice. Spontaneous and vulnerable yet polished and powerful, she clasps at her listener’s heartstrings through hazy emotional testaments about heartbreak, self-reflection, and the human condition. While most voices bring a smile to the face and gently graze the listener like a pleasant summer breeze, Creti’s effortlessly digs at something rooted much deeper in the soul, like falling back into the tide and letting the waves carry your weight for a moment.
On her Atlantic Records debut single, “Strange,” Alicia Creti delivers a hair-raising performance, showing off her natural talents while crafting an emotional journey through poignant lyrics about heartbreak and self-estrangement. The track pairs her ethereal vibrato with melancholic piano chords, slowly building to a climactic chorus of swelling choir harmonies, classic church organs, and booming 808 percussion. The first track off of her upcoming debut EP Self/Less, it’s clear from only her handful of releases that the Canadian singer-songwriter is not just a gifted singer but a talented artist with a compelling, emotional vision to share.
Alicia Creti sat down with NUANCE for a virtual interview to talk about her musical origins, suddenly turning her dream into a career, and where she’s taking her sound from here.
Photo Credit: Claudia Rosha
Born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, Creti was singing and writing songs as early as six years old, explaining, “Basically–my whole life–I’ve always sung.” Encouraged by her parents, who got their daughter piano lessons to help her improve, Creti began performing every chance she could: “Basically, any opportunity that I had to sing, I took. It started with talent shows in school, and that kind of got me to get my confidence up with like, ‘oh, maybe I can sing. Maybe this could be, you know, more than just like a hobby. I actually recently just found an email that I wrote to Virgin Radio when I was 12 being like ‘I have big dreams please listen to my song!”
While Creti loved to perform and being a singer professionally was always a dream playing like a movie in her head, a music career never seemed really possible, so she focused on her studies in mathematics instead:
“I feel like in actuality, I never actively pursued it. I just never even gave myself that chance… There’s no clear road to the music industry. It kind of feels like something that sucks you in and you’re like what, what is this place? But I never really had a plan on how to get there, and I think because of that and then just kind of being deep in my studies and being a good student and like good at math, which was like the opposite. I just never really gave myself that chance. But when I tell you that I’m in exams, like studying for like, physics, studying for chem all throughout high school and University, I’d like be in the exam looking into the future and the image was always me on a stage or like me like accepting a Grammy and like all of these things that I firmly believe now were manifestations despite what I was saying.”
Enrolling at the local Concordia University, Alicia Creti studied Finance at the John Molson School of Business. She excelled, yet she felt something missing all the while. Nearing graduation in Spring 2020, she remembers turning to music as the pandemic shut the world down. Creti struggled to envision a future that didn’t involve song: “I honestly fell into pretty bad depression. Because I was about to graduate. I was studying finance. And I was like, I don’t like this. It was the pandemic, so you know, school shut down and the rhythm of just going with the flow stopped, and I was like, this is just not what I love to do.”
Turning to her first passion as the world shut down and classes stopped, Alicia Creti started uploading covers of her favorite songs to TikTok to pass the time and work through her anxieties about the future. She explains how the first step toward her career came from an everyday conversation in the library:
“I was like in the library, we’d have finance exam literally the next day, but that was all rumors of like, it’s going to shut down like there’s going to be shut down, and I swear it was the week later, everything closed, and that’s when the pandemic kind of started. And I just remember being on, like, our 13th hour of studying, my friend went into the book aisle of the library and scrolled tick tock, though it was like a brand new app at the time. We were just scrolling on it, crying and laughing because we were delirious at this point...
Photo Credit: Claudia Rosha
...And she turns it into this pep talk of her being like, ‘Come on, like, you need to post yourself. Anybody could go viral and, like, you’re really good; you should do it.’ I wasn’t even posting myself on my own private Instagram. I just shied away from that because it was like a negative spiral into cocoon land. But I said, ‘Okay, you know what? I’m gonna listen to her,’ and I posted myself on a Snapchat video that literally, like you hear the cuts in it, but you don’t even see my face. I’m like, whatever. I’ll just post it.”
After posting inconsistently for about a month, Creti uploaded an “All I Want For Christmas is You “cover and was surprised to see the video’s views balloon quickly to 250k. “I was like, oh my god, this is kind of crazy. Like, I can’t stop now.” Realizing she suddenly had people noticing her voice, Creti threw together another cover with her friend and suddenly had a path to the music industry take shape:
“So the next day, I even remember my friend was coming over to go for a walk because that’s all that we can do. And I’m like, Okay, let me just film this duet real quick. And it was session three to summer Walker. Literally recorded it with her the next day and I was like, okay, good post. I left my phone at home. We went for our walk. I came home and my phone was blowing up and that’s kind of when it really started and at that point, it had gotten to like 2 million views. I had gotten some recognition with like Meghan Trainor, other people that I had, you know, listened to growing up and been like what the heck is going on? It was literally like the day before my birthday was like December 30. And it was just kind of crazy.”
As the video blew up, labels and people in the music industry were suddenly calling, eventually leading her to meet manager Amisha Sarkar of TRST. RCRDS to help start her solo career: “She’s the best.” While continuing to release covers on Tik-Tok, Creti released her first two singles, “Congratulations'' and “You Ain’t Shit,” last year to critical acclaim, garnering cosigns from major artists like Kehlani, Sam Smith, Ty Dolla $ign, and Summer Walker herself.
While the A-list shoutouts were inspiring and exciting, Creti explains that it’s been the personal outreach from fans reacting to her music that’s kept her driven to keep writing, recording, and performing new songs: “the outreach was just it’s just crazy to be able to connect with somebody with you know, a song that you wrote to heal yourself. And now they’re kind of feeling the same way. Like if I can do that for one person, I can be happy for the rest of my life.”
After signing with Atlantic Records earlier this year, “Strange '' marks Creti’s most sonically polished release, surrounding her remarkable vocal display with well-crafted production that spotlights her voice and piano melodies in a grand, stirring frame. Reflecting on the inspiration for the track, Creti describes how it came from wrestling with how she treated herself in relationship to others and what it meant to be selfless:
Photo Credit: Claudia Rosha
“Throughout all my life in all relationships–whether romantic or friendship–I just always loved hard and neglected all of my own needs and had none of my own boundaries. Because I thought that that is what it meant to be ultimately selfless, and I thought that that’s what love was supposed to be…
…But because of these qualities, now, looking back, I’m like, I was easily taken advantage of in that way. So it’s interesting because it’s a song that when you look at it from, like, more of a negative perspective, I guess, or in that kind of self-deprecating way, it’s a cry for help. It’s feeling lost after a breakup; it’s feeling lost after losing somebody and having given yourself to them completely and then not really knowing what to do.”
Thinking about the outro for “Strange,” where Creti addresses a “you” that helps her get over the heartbreak of the track, she explains how it takes on new meaning for her on the other end of the struggle in the song: “So, maybe in the past, the outro was reflective of like, getting into the same old habit into the same type of relationship…But now, if you were to listen to that song after knowing the story of the EP, I feel like now I’m at a point where the you is like myself and my family, and just kind of me showing up for myself in ways that I wanted other people to do.”
The first track shared off her upcoming debut EP Self/Less, Creti explains that “Strange” embodies the rest of the project’s focus on selflessness and the emotional damage it creates. While the story recounts this struggle to put the self first in an ill-fated relationship, Creti adds that the writing recording of the EP itself was the light she found in the dark by finally doing something for herself:
“It’s about feeling selfless and without an identity because of experiences that got me to this point, specifically this relationship that the EP is about but also thinking of my family and putting other people before me with every decision that I made, to the point where I was so unhappy that I didn’t even know who I was anymore. It’s just me stepping into a more empowered position for my own mental health and doing something for myself.”
Having recently moved to LA, Creti says she’s excited about the future: “I just made the move, and it’s been difficult, but amazing and just really hopeful. And it’s been an incredible journey and I’m so grateful.” While she describes having to move away from her brother as extremely difficult, who is autistic and plays a major role in Creti’s life, she’s happy to share that “Now, he has adjusted a lot more and is excited to come see me. I’ve become kind of like the cool sister.”
With the Self/Less on the way and new fans catching on every day, Alicia Creti is a talented artist who just started to find her voice, which already sounds tremendous. While she’s now a long way from the talent shows or University in Montreal, Creti was proud to share that she was able to eventually graduate from Concordia due to greatly appreciated leniency from her professors–although it’s hard to believe she’ll need to fall back on that Finance degree.