While she prepares herself for her upcoming show, Czarina takes advantage of the unique surrounds of The Apartment for a promotional photo shoot. “I like to portray really classy, lady-like kinds of things,” Czarina says with a somewhat self-conscious giggle. “The venue that I am having the gig at and also this photo shoot has pictures of Audrey Hepburn and I really like that whole classic style. I even had a friend who is a stage designer help out with everything I am doing on the night.”
Balancing the seemingly opposite pursuits of fashioning songs for a pop-based audience versus toddlers, Czarina explains that music is still the driving force behind her desire to create. “Music is more my passion; I have always been writing songs,” she says. “But I have two children and my eldest was in prep last year and I was doing reading with him and realised that I should do something for that age group. So I wrote a children’s book. I have always written poetry and poetry to me can either be put into a song or they can just stay as poetry. Everything else kind of follows the music.”
Later this year Czarina hopes to release her children’s album and has added a charitable element to the project via an alignment with The Starlight Foundation. “I’m releasing that children’s album this year,” she explains. “It will hopefully come out in September or October and $5 from the sale of each CD will go to The Starlight Foundation. The thing that I did with it was that I tried to make it easy listening for the parents as well. Being a parent myself there are so many songs out there for kids that do your head in a bit so I tried to make them more pop-style songs and the only thing that makes them different is the lyric. Some of the tracks are also just poetry in there along with lullabies.”
For her upcoming performance Czarina has enhanced her show with more musical and visual complexity. “I used to always perform with just dancers but what I am doing this time is performing with a full band so there are no backing tracks or anything like that,” she says. “I just thought I’d bring in two female dancers to add to the visuals of the night and we’ll just be incorporating some nice movements. Some of my songs are really easy listening while others are really poppy so they’ll just be adding subtle movements to each song.
“I’m promoting the new music video for the second single off the album, Boomerang and I am also promoting the album, My Soul, which was released in March. It is also just a chance to showcase my songs as a songwriter and a performer.”
Czarina explains that while she had been working full-time she has decided to dedicate her time entirely to her work as an artist. Mentioning supportive parents, Czarina also explains the frustration that is felt by a lot of artists particularly in the genre of pop music. It seems that while indie kids banging out their post-punk tunes in a garage might be annoyed at the difficulty they have garnering a greater audience, pop musicians suffer even more. Pop is a harsh mistress that seems to have an all or nothing gauge of success. Although it is a time-honoured cliché, Czarina insists that her music is for love not money. “It’s just so hard to get into and my mentality is just that I do because I love doing it,” she says. “If I don’t have the money then I stop for a moment until I have a little more money to do it again. Music is so personal and not everyone will enjoy what I do but I will have people that do enjoy what I do and I think because of those online viral songs that take off, I think some people are just really, really lucky. I know that I work really hard and I will never, ever say that amounts to nothing. I feel that everything I do is an amazing achievement and although we all want to be known by a lot of people, I am happy just doing it at all.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
