Like many people, Victoria Canal failed to score tickets to last year’s Glastonbury festival. But the singer-songwriter’s solution wasn’t quite so relatable: Coldplay were headlining, so she messaged Chris Martin to ask if he could get her in. It was 1am in London, and Canal was drinking with friends when Martin called to make a better offer: how about she join him on stage?
The next day, Canal thought she had “hallucinated” the entire conversation. “I have had many dreams like that before,” she says. But no. Come June, there she was: providing vocal and piano accompaniment to Paradise in front of an enraptured 100,000-strong crowd. In the footage, she seems to be in her element, completely unfazed by such a gargantuan gig. In reality, was she nervous? She pauses and gives me a strange look. “Of course! It was anything but chill – it was the biggest stage in the world, with the biggest band in the world!”
Martin’s vote of confidence didn’t come entirely out of the blue. Canal first met him in 2021, after sharing a slightly unhinged spoof Rolling Stone cover she had made years earlier on Instagram, with the headline: “Victoria Canal wows Chris Martin at a clown’s birthday party.” She doesn’t think the Coldplay frontman ever saw the actual post – “and I’d be terribly embarrassed if he did!” – but it did catch the eye of a colleague of his, who forwarded on her music. Martin was immediately enamoured – online, you can watch him describe her hauntingly beautiful piano ballad Swan Song as “one of the best songs ever” – and helped her land a record deal the following year.
Canal relays this story on a video call between forkfuls of coconut cake; the one Tom Cruise sends out to hundreds of pals each Christmas. 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. (“I’m sorry to bum u out but i am not dating the man,” she wrote on Instagram.)
But she did pick up some career tips, learning that Cruise “never pats himself on the back for too long. He’ll let himself have the moment of watching the movie and being like ‘this is great’, but he never lingers. That’s probably the most deeply inspiring thing about hanging out with someone like him – no matter how well he’s done he just wants to keep reaching.”
Celebrity is catching, and Canal’s famous new friends – she also bonded with fellow Coldplay guest Michael J Fox – have given her profile a sizeable boost. But now the 26-year-old, who already has two Ivor Novello songwriting awards to her name, is stepping out of the shadow of her starry social circle with the release of her debut album, Slowly, It Dawns.
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. Such nuggets of emotional truth come naturally to the musician, who describes herself as “deeply devoted to self-reflection. Not everyone will sit and journal for hours a day about ‘what does it all mean’, but I’m just inherently that way. I’m always analysing what’s happening in my life.”
On Slowly, It Dawns, the tunes are strong and the lyrics are witty, but it’s Canal’s candour that is most striking. On the Harry Nilsson-esque 15%, paranoia descends as she departs a party (“I’m a pain in the ass / Is everyone happy I’m leaving?”). On another track, she wonders “how can I be a person, and not die of comparison?” as she shrivels in the glow of an overachieving peer.
This is the vulnerability-to-fan-intimacy pipeline currently used by the biggest female popstars (Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Charli xcx), but Canal goes further than most. She’s a prolific Instagram poster, meticulously documenting her highs (magazine covers, awards) as well as her lows (feelings of insecurity, lacklustre ticket sales). While her filterless approach engages her followers, it has also got her in trouble.
“Many people around me would rather that I not say certain things – if I’m like ‘touring sucks’ or I’m really depressed, it’s not good for business,” she sighs. “At the same time, I am more interested in being authentic to myself than I am in promoting something.” Then again, such a stance can be unpleasantly exposing. “Sometimes oversharing can perpetuate the very mental health issue at hand, because you want it to fix something but it doesn’t.”
The music industry is bewildering at the best of times, but for Canal there is yet another layer of complexity. The musician was born without a right forearm due to a congenital disorder, which led to many tactless headlines early on in her career. Yet she also worries that her music is given undue prominence for the same reason. “I’m constantly wondering whether people only grant me opportunities because of my difference,” she says. She was once brought on stage by a musician who told the crowd she had “overcome so much”. At that stage, she didn’t voice her objections – “I was just playing the role of inspiration the way I thought I was supposed to” – but nowadays is determined to avoid such reductive treatment. She even called Chris Martin before Glastonbury to check he wasn’t planning to mention her disability during their set.
Canal describes her limb difference as “the least interesting thing” about her but “not irrelevant”. At the very least, it has a significant – and positive – impact on the way she plays instruments: “I think limitations are helpful. Some of the most brilliant musicians I know are actually burdened by their abundance of options. 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).
Canal has spent almost a lifetime focused on her career – but if her 20s have taught her one thing, it’s that professional peaks don’t translate into personal happiness. Slowly, It Dawns is partly about the inner mess that belies worldly success. And for all the dreams that came true in 2024, she’s still beset with ordinary troubles: money, ageing parents, romantic uncertainty. But she’s also learning that the struggle is what gives life meaning. “I think,” she concludes, “part of the sick satisfaction of being a human being is suffering.”
Source: theguardian.com
