About Kiesza
Kiesa Rae Ellestad , known professionally as Kiesza , is a Canadian singer and multi-instrumentalist from Calgary. In 2017, she was involved in a car accident in Toronto, suffering severe injuries that required her to take several years off to recover. To date, she has released the albums Sound of a Woman and Crave .
Kiesza was born and raised in Calgary. Her last name, Ellestad, is Norwegian from her paternal side and her grandfather is from Fagernes in Norway. In an interview with Metro, Kiesza claimed that she can trace her lineage to someone who fought alongside Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn, elaborating, "There's a lot of Scottish people in Canada. Tons. My grandpa was of Scottish heritage—he was of the black Douglases".
At thirteen, Kiesza took a sailing class at summer camp, and continued her interest past age 16, when she took part in the Sail and Life Training Society program. She later became a sailing instructor at the Glenmore Sailing School in 2007. A year after, she joined the reserves of the Royal Canadian Navy along with her brother, becoming a NavCom . It was while she was at crew singalongs at the Navy that she taught herself to play guitar.
Meanwhile, she also entered the Miss Universe Canada pageant. She stated that her time in the Navy motivated her to give away 4,500 CDs to Canadian troops serving in Afghanistan in 2008. Kiesza took part in the Young Canadians, where she trained in jazz and tap dancing, as well as theatre. She also trained as a ballerina, but a knee injury at age 15 ended her ballet career. When Kiesza was 18, she said that her parents' divorce inspired her to write her first song as a way of expressing her feelings. The same year, she heard a song of hers played on the radio.
In 2005, CKUA Folk Routes host Tom Coxworth selected Kiesza to perform for a live audience and to be broadcast live on his radio show. Shortly after, she was accepted to Selkirk College in Nelson, British Columbia, where she studied keyboard, voice, and guitar; she graduated in 2009. Next, Kiesza won a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Afterward, she went to New York City in 2010 to advance her music career. Although she started as mainly a folk singer, after attending Berklee and then living in New York, she moved to a more "uptempo sound", for which she worked with producer Rami Samir Afuni. In 2010, she was selected to play at the Canada Day celebrations at Trafalgar Square in London to 30,000 people.
In 2012, Kiesza released her first single after starting work with Afuni in New York, a "disco-infused pop" song titled "Oops", about a couple that had unprotected sex. She labelled her style of music at the time as "SteamPop", described by AjanWrites as "a flaming brew of bold, boisterous pop filled with tongue-in-cheek lyrics". In a later 2014 interview, Kiesza said "Oops" was made as a joke.
Map & Directions To Venue
