Mayra Andrade
Dany Lavital – keys
Thomas Naïm – guitar
Régis Thérèse – bass
Rémi Sanna – drums

On her fourth album, “Lovely Difficult”, Mayra Andrade draws a world map that runs from her native Cap Verde to European pop and Tropicalist dreams. A confidential, generous, multilingual album.
Mayra Andrade is lovely – adorable, generous and radiant. Her firmly-rooted, distinctive, poetic, topical voice was immediately described a few years ago as “the other Cape Verde” – the sound of a Cesaria Evora freed of the twists of fate and patina of tradition.

Mayra’s singing is a blend of radiant, dancing colors, velvet beats and spicy melodies. Her voice is subtly seasoned with pepper, as if the Europe of pop had always been a tropical archipelago. The songs conjure up an eternal summer that disperses the mists and chills, but never resort to the tinsel of exoticism. Sung in Cape Verdean creole, English and Portuguese, they carry us away in their warm, adventurous unpredictability. Mayra’s pop spans the world’s entire vast sweep from Western romanticism to Southern sensuality, and domestic reggae to African 3/4 time. It is topical, tropical, traveling pop. Her aim was simply to make “music that reflected my life”.

in collaboration with Florence Queer Festival

[photo: Youri Lenquette]