2024-08-28 09:41:28
She wanted to study in New York, in the end she got there at least virtually. As the face of Spotify’s Equal campaign supporting women in music, she looked down from a billboard in Times Square. Now singer Annabelle is fulfilling another part of the American dream. The clip for the new song Dear Cali celebrates California, the sun and palm trees. He imagines that he is already in Los Angeles.
In the video for her upbeat summer single, which she released this Friday, the singer cruises through sun-drenched, palm-lined streets in a luxurious yellow convertible. But it soon becomes clear that neither the Ferris wheel nor the seaside villas flashing behind her are real. As in real life, the United States, where she would like to break through, remains a fiction for her. His director and partner Annabelle Matěj Chlupaček thought of playing with the fine line between dream and reality in the clip.
Twenty-eight-year-old Anna Žitníková alias Annabelle does not hide that the Czech scene is too tight for her and she prefers to see herself abroad, preferably across the ocean. She believes in manifestations, in this sense of the word, imagining the future as if it had already happened, so she decided to turn it into a song this time. She remembers the year before last, when she similarly prayed for the Angel award for the discovery of the year. “That was probably the funniest manifestation that came to me. A friend told me that I had to put a statue of Angel on my phone wallpaper. I put it there for fun and really got it. At the same time, there were much more well-known and established artists standing against me,” she recalls.
She is convinced that if a person really believes in his dreams and “correctly” wishes, they will eventually come true. And so now he sings in a cheerful summer ode to the West Coast of the USA, God bless California with its eternal sunshine. “I would very much like to live there one day. At least for a while,” she says. He believes that breaking through in Los Angeles is not impossible. After all, she spent about two weeks there this spring, got to know the local music community and, coincidentally, also sat in on one of the awards. A few meters from the star Billie Eilish, who received the trophy there for the song What Was I Made For from the movie Barbie. “She stood up, her hair was blowing, the smell reached me,” Annabelle describes enthusiastically. In California, nothing seems impossible.
Anything is possible in California. | Photo: Honza Mudra
The basis of the new song Dear Cali was also created during the two-week stay. Annabelle got here by accident, even though she had been wishing hard for it for the past two years. “It still didn’t work out on time or money,” he says. Finally, a friend arranged for her to stay with a lady who colored the film for him. Then the singer moved into the villa with French producers Her Demons, who worked with her on her previous track Flowers On My Eyes released this May and happened to be in Los Angeles at the same time. “It just came together so beautifully cosmically,” the musician once again refers to the power of fate.
At first, she only met informally with the producer duo, who worked with, for example, pop megastar Taylor Swift. Then they started creating together. Annabelle wanted to come up with a song to describe how California affects her. “Just look out at those palm trees,” she quotes as instructing the producers on what she wanted to get into the song. In the end, she took home the musical background, including a distinctive guitar riff, and finished the text in the Czech Republic.
Yellow depression
Dear Cali, like Annabelle’s other work, can remind you of the Grammy winner, the popular young Olivia Rodrigo. “There’s an age difference between us and we sing about different topics, but as far as the music itself, I often use it as a reference for how I want to mix mine,” she says. While the 21-year-old American often sings about a broken heart, Annabelle opts for cheerful songs with empowering lyrics like “I feel beautiful, I’m the main character of my story, the screenwriter and the director” in the song Flowers On My Eyes. Her trademark is an energetic yellow color and children’s “tattoos” on her cheeks.
Her music is cheerful, but that doesn’t mean she is always cheerful. | Photo: Honza Mudra
This may seem paradoxical; Anna Žitníková comes to the interview straight from therapy and openly admits that “before Annabelle” she was going through depression. According to her, on the contrary, it makes perfect sense. “Perhaps it’s a stereotype, but at one time I felt a lot about comedy actors that they are often sad in real life. On the contrary, representatives of serious roles laugh all the time. Maybe the contrast of life and creation also applies to music,” she thinks.
She is said to have entered the “yellow period” after several years of depression. “At that time, I was changing a lot, and only later did I learn from a friend that yellow is the color of transformation. I wanted to face sadness, be happy and strong,” she describes how her solo project was born.
Before that, she sang in a band called Jo’anna and did everything for a living, including working in bars. She grew up thinking that music wouldn’t pay the bills. It was only when she was taken under the wing of the Universal publishing house that the world of musicians who make money from their work opened up to her. Now she enjoys this comfort too, albeit with momentary dips. Last year, for example, she delivered food for a while. “But I can find pleasure in learning something new and seeing what different streets people live on,” he says.
Annabelle’s music doesn’t feel like work. He considers it a gift. | Photo: Honza Mudra
She doesn’t have to find her passion in music, she says it doesn’t even feel like work, so she considers it a gift that she can make a living from it. Luck was on her way. For example, she consciously chose pop as the genre for her solo career, so that she would have the greatest possible chance of earning money with music. For pragmatic reasons, he also releases a song in Czech from time to time. He observes that Anglophone work is not so popular in the Czech Republic, but in order to receive support from his home publishing house abroad, where he wishes to break through, he must first achieve decent audience numbers in his native country. In the end, she was the first Czech to get Universal’s foreign support for the single Flowers On My Eyes.
Paradoxically, one of her Czech songs has the English name Heels or Podpatky. It was said to have originated more as a joke, almost a mistake. In it, Annabelle advises that “whether you are 200 centimeters or five feet, wear heels”. Together with the primitive dance that she invented for the text, the song did well on social networks, where it attracted a lot of positive and negative attention.
Ewa Farna even danced to it on the TikTok platform, for whom Annabelle wrote the lyrics to the song Version 02 from the Umami album and who wanted to support her. “The dance is stupid. It was made because I have to make tiktoks but I’m too lazy to plan ahead and I didn’t have anything in mind. Ewa is so sweet she did a tiktok on Heels too but I thought she was poor because the dance looks absolutely horrible,” Annabelle assesses critically.
Heels also garnered a lot of condemnations and messages on the networks, saying that the artist should “keep her hidden talent hidden”. She makes no bones about it, saying that hate is usually a sign that a post is doing well on social media. “I was just annoyed by the comments that attacked the fact that I was a girl. A lot of people wrote to me to go back to the kitchen and that girls shouldn’t make music. That seemed really out of line to me,” she says.
And what will happen before Annabelle “manifests” all the way to California? In autumn, after the summer single, he is preparing a slightly more melancholic composition. That next fall, her first record could finally be released. She remains optimistic about success overseas. “The competition is great. But I’m hopeful, it’s definitely also due to luck, and I still have that,” he says. “I’m taking small steps. Sometimes maybe too small and slow, but I believe that patience brings roses,” he hopes.
Video: They solve stupid things in Slovakia. We even cry over politics, says Katarzia (27 May 2024)
“It’s hard for me to come to terms with what has been happening in Slovakia for years,” singer Katarína Kubošiová alias Katarzia said in the Spotlight show. | Video: Spotlight Team