Alessia Labate is a 22-year-old weirdo who loves music so much it became her life. “I started by playing in my dad’s studio with mics and cables at age 2,” Alessia tells Eat This Music, “at 8 I already understood how the recording process works.” Today, Alessia is a professional singer, songwriter, vocalist and vocal producer, and also an independent artist, and she mainly works internationally. Currently, Alessia is based in Milano, where she is sitting down to have a chat with Eat This Music, but she was born in Cosenza, a small city in Italy.
“I’m good! The coronavirus paranoia is slowly going away,” Alessia expresses to Eat This Music. “I’m not really cool with people I don’t know around,” she adds, “but at least I can see my friends again and we can do stuff, like the Something Special music video. It’s refreshing, I really wanted people to hear the song, it’s a “special” [laughs] one for me.”
Speaking to Eat This Music on the release of her latest single, Alessia explains that it is essentially about real friendships, “I was thinking about my best friend while writing it, and all the times he pushed me to do better.”
The song came out while Alessia was playing around with chords from one of her old unreleased songs. “The first thing I wrote was the hook,” Alessia explains. A few hours later she had a skype session with Ryan Stewart (he won a Juno Award with Carly Rae Jepsen, but Alessia had no idea back then) and played him the hook. “He liked it,” Alessia assured Eat This Music, “we wrapped it up pretty quickly”, from there on the song stayed in their dropbox folders for a year. Although, “It felt like the right time to put it out,” Alessia states.
The visuals for her “Something Special” music video were a real team effort involving Alessia’s friends from Naples as well: “Serena Nappo designed,” Alessia adds, she “sew the clothes and shipped it to Milano” for her, “theartofeko worked on the graphics and my best friend Walter took care of directing the video with Megan Stancanelli and shot all the pictures.”
“All the things I say are fucking true!”, Alessia states to Eat This Music, the lyrics “I can’t dance you make me wanna try” and “I don’t talk to people I don’t know but you make me wanna know them all” are from her life, “my BFF Walter is so outgoing and people like him a lot while I’m super shy with people I don’t know.”
Alessia continues, “he always pushes me to be more social, also cause it’s important for people in the industry like us: he’s a photographer and singer/songwriter as well.”
As briefly touched on above, Alessia felt like now was the right time to celebrate friends in a moment like this. “I decided during the lockdown when I was missing my friends the most,” she adds, “this felt like a nice way to remind all of us we are special and deserve love.”
“I’m not really good with plans,” Alessia admits to Eat This Music, “I’m definitely gonna have another single dropping after the summer,” and in 2021 Alessia would like to focus and an EP. “More electronic music will come, and *spoiler* I’ll be on STMPD again!”
