BY FILIPA MOREIRA l PUBLISHED: 04.05.2023
Images: @giulia
Song: Planeta Marte
Strong, self-assured, and with an irrepressible inner light, the Brazilian pop and electronic music sensation, Giulia Be, will abduct us not to planet Mars with her spacecraft but rather on an unforgettable journey, where she will unravel some stories about her musical journey so far, love, and the power of a life lived authentically. T-0: embark with us and discover this unique artist!
MEMORIES KEPT UNDER LOCK AND KEY ON HER SPACECRAFT
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Giulia's passion for music began when she was around six years old, when she first started taking piano classes while her brothers were at soccer practice. Her memories from that time revolve around the classical songs that her strict piano teacher taught her for two years, listening to her parent's playlists, but also around a love of Disney's Hannah Montana, a show that would make her fall in love with 'the best of both worlds' and start imagining her own little world. Thus, noticing at a certain point that there were also other ways to make music and that it didn't need to be necessarily classical music - this happened especially when she discovered what a chord was and began learning these - saying that it was 'game over for Beethoven and Bach' and that it was time to completely focus on this new side of music that she had just discovered.
Only being eight years old and never having gone through a heartbreak, she wrote her first song, called Superhero, and sang it with all of her heart and soul as if she did. The song went like this:
'If love was a number, it would have lots of zeros. So just for tonight, I’ll let you be my superhero'
Stating that by composing these songs, she would find a way to communicate with the world, as she considers the piano to be her therapist for a long time. Hence, she found in music a refuge where she could be herself and tell her stories. Ultimately, what was being portrayed in Disney's Hannah Montana was something she never really deemed as a possibility for herself until years later.
Images: @gabrielgrrtt
HIGH SCHOOL GIRL TO MENINA SOLTA
Despite her big passion for music and her wish to try her luck in the music industry, Giulia's family wanted her to become a lawyer and did not truly support her dream. Nonetheless, when asked what gave her the confidence to focus on music instead, she said that the fact of being a Leo and always doing something anyway, when people tell her that she's not able to do it, strongly gave her that push to still fight and try to pursue her dream and put herself out there.
There's this expression in Portuguese,‘dar a cara tapa’, which literally means to put your face to be slapped. Giulia describes her younger self as a Tumblr girl who loved HTML coding for her Tumblr themes, making her own banners in Photoshop, and really wanting her YouTube channel to look professional, so she would create designs so that it would seem like there had been a whole team involved in the process. According to her, her initial approach was really based on the principle of 'fake it till you make it'. Referring back to the expression, she clearly remembers getting 'slapped' by a few people, such as people that she thought to be her friends, who criticized her voice and did not believe that she would be able to reach anything, by uploading videos of herself singing covers of Kell Smith, Alice Merton, and 1KILO to YouTube. Giulia recognizes, nowadays, why her family didn't support her at the time: they were scared of her getting hurt and being teased by people.
But what she has come to see now 'is that a lot of times when people see other people being courageous, especially courageous to do something that they might want to do but aren't brave enough to do, they're going to be haters'.
In fact, Giulia refers to Theodore Roosevelt's quote, Man in the Arena.
Which basically sums up that it is not the critic who counts. It is the man who was there in the middle of the arena with his face covered in blood, sweat, and tears, because at least he's putting himself out there.
Stating that the quote also sums up how she feels about it all, she says that 'the youth is the moment of courage, and it's a moment where we have to put all of the things that are in our hearts out and deal with them later - it's the moment of putting ourselves out there'. Affirming that she always tries to connect with the idea that no matter what people say orthink, you can eventually prove them wrong. 'Being an artist is a mix of being delusionally confident and incredibly insecure and finding how to walk that line', she says.
BRASIL TÁ EM FESTA!
Back in 2019, the singer reached the charts with her song, Menina Solta, not only in Brazil but also in Portugal, and since then she has only been releasing hits like 'Eu me amo mais', 'Tempo', 'Chega', and 'Pessoa certa na hora errada', but she has also already collaborated with many of the greats of the industry such as Luan Santana, David Carreira, Toquinho, Simone & Simaria, Pink Sweat$, and Vitão.
Image: @gabrielgrrtt
Song: BRASIL TÁ EM FESTA
Giulia's inspiration for her songs comes mostly from her friends and their stories. She believes that 'there's a dangerous line when you see artists saying that they had to suffer to make a song or that they had to go through something specific to make that one song'. Nevertheless, she doesn't disagree with the statement; on the contrary, she believes that it is true, as in order to write some of the songs that she has written, she had to suffer and experience a certain feeling to be able to actually write those words.
But a lot of times, like with Menina Solta or even (Não) era amor, those were songs that weren't about her at all. 'Once I figured out that I could write songs from a narrator's point of view as well, all that mattered to me was really that story and how I was going to translate it. I felt that my superpower was kind of understanding feelings and finding a way to put that into a song structure, for example, verse, pre-chorus, and chorus. And make it stay in people's minds and be that moment of catharsis, I guess, for all of us together', she says.
At heart, Giulia sees life as a great inspiration, as there are so many amazing stories and feelings that can be told through music, and one of the things that she truly loves about songwriting is when people connect to the story and the feeling that is being expressed in the song and can relate a moment of their lives to that specific story - 'essentially going back to an idea, which is that we're all humans and share similar or even the same experiences at different times and parts of the world. Music being a tool for connection is what fascinates Giulia, who states that she 'has her ears always open for a rhyme, for a line, for someone else's story'.
AMOR É LOKKO E MAIS UM POUCO
Giulia has been on the go ever since her debut as a protagonist in the movie, Beyond the Universe, on Netflix, which is one of the most watched films on the platform, and the release of her first album, Disco Voador, in November of last year. A record with 13 tracks that chronicle the process of falling in love, being heartbroken, living the process, healing, being reborn in freedom, and believing again in true love.
When asked about what love is, she says that while growing up and figuring out her own spirituality and relationship with God, she struggled with the word God, as she 'understood that God was love'. Also, saying that, by seeing things that way, it made it 'much easier to kind of just look at the world, you know, that it's this incredible energy of compassion and empathy and really always looking at a situation from a point of view of, like, I want to listen to this other side and I want to grow from it. And even if it's going to bother me, love is still listening, like powering your way through any situation.It's also like the driving force, I think, for everything in the world, but especially with music. It's just so powerful to be able to talk about different perspectives of love, different points of view, and different ways of dealing with love.'
The first track of her recent album, Brasil tá em festa, centres on Giulia falling in love, which subsequently leads to the song, FBI, which is about 'quebrando a cara dela', in good Portuguese. It's just her falling flat to her face and recognising that maybe that one good guy that she found wasn't actually 'the right one', which is totally okay. Throughout the album, she explores those feelings, goes through those emotions, and talks about how she is becoming a stronger and more empathic woman because of those romantic delusions and disillusions.
'Strength is very much associated with being vulnerable to me. And just because I'm able to put those songs out there and kind of heal in a collective way, I always say that after I release a song, it stops being mine because it becomes ours. And I really believe that's true because now it's a shared experience. Now it's out there for all of us to really identify with those words and kind of feel those same feelings and talk about it', she remarks.
(NÃO) ERA AMOR
We all know that while love is an experience and emotion that can make us feel alive, it can also be quite painful and kill us in a certain way. When exploring this idea with Giulia, she tells us that this has to do with the intensity and not with the actual feeling of love; she is of the opinion that ‘it's about how much you donate yourself to actually feeling the experience.
"I genuinely believe that in order to be able to feel the highs of life really high, you've got to feel the lows really low."
Reflecting on this, she believes that "those are the moments that are able to make the highs feel even better and more worth it."
Particularly, her song, Show, talks about her dealing with illusion, not only in a relationship context but in a general kind of media spin story. ‘I know this is who I am. And whatever you try to spin, whatever story you try to spin about me, or however you try to fool me, you're not going to do it. This is a show; this is not real. And I'm a person that's real, and I attach myself to things that are real’, she explains.
‘This paradox of being able to deal with shallow feelings through love and even through the hard moments of navigating those feelings, being able to spin it - it’s really something that I do in a lot of songs’, she reveals.
Giulia shares with us a funny story about her first song, Too Bad, admitting that she wasn’t feeling what she wrote in the song at all. ‘I was singing, I bet you can't love like me; I bet you can't kiss like me. You messed up'. She admits that she was completely broken at that point in time and that she wanted the person to be like, ‘Yeah, too bad, you lost me, right?'. So this song made her capable of dealing with that feeling or looking at it in a different way, like spinning that story into a narrative that was better for herself.
Her song, Não Era Amor, for example, was a song that she wrote to her best friend's ex and in which she has the following line: 'Agora você 'tá na m*rda, e ela 'tá bem', basically representing the idea that the guy is the one doing bad because he lost her and that she's doing fine without him. Giulia admits that at the time, her friend wasn't doing fine but still didn't feel the way it is expressed in the song.' But that was the message I wanted to pass; you know, that's the story I wanted to write - a story in the position where it's the loss of the man, and it's a powerful tool to just reshape whatever situation you're living, even in a poem, like sometimes I'll be in the saddest mood, but then I write a poem or write a song, and that is able to shift how I look at the situation.'
'There's this really good phrase called 'make your meaning'. And I think that's true in all walks of life; you know, whatever happens, you can assign whatever meaning you want to that experience in your life. You define the experience; the experience doesn't define you.’
Image: @giulia
AVISO DE AMIGO
Giulia's message to our readers is mainly that our creativity and imagination are our strengths. She points out that we find ourselves at a really interesting point in our lives and in society in general, as our generation and the youth in particular are 'becoming the type of humans that are going to have to deal with a lot due to how the world is going to turn out'. Another piece of advice she leaves is that the best thing that we can do is to remain true to ourselves, especially since ‘the internet and social media have completely changed us in terms of how real we’re able to be and how we showcase ourselves and our personalities with people all over the world’, she says.
‘And I think that's my advice, and my message is really to always remember your place in the world and remember the little butterfly effects. Flapping your wings on one side of the world can sometimes cause a tsunami on the other side of the world. And you never know until you try’, she says dauntlessly.
Watch Giulia's newest videoclip 'Matching Tattoo' here:
Follow Giulia:
Instagram: @giulia
Facebook: @Giulia Be.
Twitter: @giulia
Tik Tok: @giulia
Youtube: @GIULIABE