Brazilian singer-songwriter Anitta released her fourth multi-lingual Album “Kisses” - she sings in Portuguese, Spanish and English - on Friday, April 5 and she is gaining even more International recognition.
The record features Brazilian superstars Caetano Veloso, Ludmilla, and Papatinho, as well as American artists Snoop Dogg, Becky G, Alesso and Prince Royce.
On Saturday, April 6, the popstar celebrated her sandal collaboration with Ipanema, the Brazilian footwear brand, alongside the launch of the album at Skybar in Los Angeles.
The event featured a panel of style mavens Alyssa Coscarelli, Ayydé Vargas, Hanna Montazami, and Delaney Glazer who discussed the latest trends of fashion and music, followed by an exclusive performance by Anitta and a guitar player with some of her newest music “Get to know Me”, “Voce Mentiu”. She wore a short tight leopard print dress and her hair pulled back.
Together, Anitta and Ipanema are heading out on a global tour to introduce the album and collection to the world, making stops in Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles and Madrid.
After the live concert Anitta and I talked backstage, she told me how she found the confidence to sing in three different languages, “Yeah, it’s really hard. Pretty much because you listen to so many people say that it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work, it’s not gonna work that you say like I need to make it work so I worked really hard to be really good in English and I’m a believer and had good faith in English that people could miss on like the literal song. “
“I’m just confident for anything. I just have this need inside me when I was four. I don’t know,” she continues.
She also told us the “real” meaning of her album title “Kisses”, “I’ve always wanted to show this person, because I’m a really complex person, you know? My personality is really complex. I have a lot of person that is inside me myself, so I wanted to show this in the sad songs which kind of person can I be sometimes, and we were thinking about…but it was too obvious to put the name of the album “Anittas”. So, we were thinking about things that could be like me, a lot of different ways, but being also the same thing always, so the kiss is something like this—you can find a different kind of kisses like family kiss or sexy kiss, whatever, friend, family, whatever—but it’s also still being a kiss. That’s why we chose this name “Kisses”—the different types of being kissed.”
She explained to me why she picked Caetano Veloso to collaborate on the song “Voce Mentiu,” “He helped me a lot in my life, so I really love him and appreciate everything he does, and he’s a friend of me, I am friends of his family and because when I wrote that song with my partners, when I listened to it the first time, it was like, this is so Caetano. I need to have him with me, and then he said yes right away.”
And when she has the opportunity to collaborate with one of her idols singer Mariah Carey, the song will be about dreams, she said, “About going for your dreams because since I was zero years old, I was listening to her, and I mean, if I met her, I could not imagine it would be happening, so if I sing with her, it would definitely need to talk about dreams, about realizing…about getting something done in your life that you could never imagine that could happen,” she said.
We also talked about where she finds inspiration for her songs, “My inspirations is things that I live, an experience that I had in my life. I always talk about real things. Or somebody or some story of another third person—another person. I like to talk about real stuff and also things that I believe that happened with me.”
Anitta, Selma Fonseca
The album 10-track Album took almost one year to complete, she said, “Just the part that depends on me. The parts that depend on other people, it was like two months, and that’s it, and we were like, come on! Come on! It was crazy.”