Kiesza, who had success with 2014’s “Hideaway,” says she has become a better songwriter ever since she suffered serious injuries in a car accident two years ago.
“My brain injury has been my biggest pathway to growth,” the 30-year-old Calgary native told Billboard. “I'm really opening up parts of myself that were shut before.”
In the summer of 2017, Kiesza was in the back seat of an Uber when it was T-boned by a taxi in a downtown Toronto intersection. Kiesza’s brain injury affected her balance and vision as well as her digestive and immune systems.
“I couldn't write music for a while because it was just too hard on my brain,” she recalled.
Kiesza said she continues to suffer from fatigue, vision problems and memory loss – but she has lots of projects in the works. She created a label, Zebra Spirit Tribe, and has been collaborating with producer Chris Malinchak on both a new album that she hopes to release later this year – her first since 2014’s Sound of a Woman – and a stage musical.
The Juno winner said the car accident and her recovery are reflected in her new songs (one of which is titled “My Head’s F**ked Up”).
“I feel like I'm in a different life,” Kiesza said. “It's weird, because I have all this access to that person that I was, but I have transformed so much internally that I don't look at the world the same way I did before.”