Before I found my voice

I was born in New Orleans, in a world where jazz, blues and soul never felt like genres to study. They were simply there.

My mother was a jazz singer. Some of my earliest musical memories are tied to her voice, small clubs, old cassettes and a piano that slowly became much more than an instrument to me.

For a long time, the piano felt safer than singing. I knew music before I knew what my own voice was supposed to be. Maybe that is why I still care so much about what happens underneath a vocal: harmony, tension, silence, the place a song comes from before anyone opens their mouth.

New Orleans gave me roots. Not rules.

Learning how to make a song mine

My real beginning as Kenia Stone came much later.

The Sound of Silence was Day One. Something appeared there that we hadn’t fully planned: a darker, lower, rougher voice, with blues underneath it and a way of inhabiting the song that felt different. A few months later, Carnival of Rust made that identity much clearer

Then came the covers.

Nothing Else Matters. Angels. Creep. Careless Whisper. Unchained Melody. Songs that already belonged deeply to other people, which meant I couldn’t hide behind writing or novelty. I had to answer a harder question: what happens when this song passes through me?

Some worked beautifully. Some absolutely didn’t.

And the failures mattered.

There were performances that were technically fine and still felt empty. I could hit the notes, shape the dynamics and do everything “correctly” — and somehow the song still wasn’t alive. That period taught me something I haven’t forgotten since: singing well is not enough.

A cover only started to matter when I stopped trying to reproduce what was already there and found my own relationship with it. The phrasing, the breath, the restraint, the rasp, the moments where I chose not to sing — that became more important than simply having a recognisable sound.

Those songs are no longer part of my public catalogue, but they are absolutely part of me. They were my school. They were where I learned that having a voice and knowing what to do with it are two very different things.

When the songs became a place

Original music changed the question again.

Suddenly I wasn’t only asking how to interpret a song. I was asking what I wanted to say, what kind of artist I wanted to become and whether something real could grow between my voice and the people listening.

That journey moved through my first original songs, Open Circle, experiments, mistakes, a virtual European tour — and eventually into Live in Málaga.

The stage changed me.

There is nowhere to hide inside a live performance. Voice, musicians, breath, timing, audience, exhaustion, mistakes — everything exists at once. And strangely, that is where I feel least interested in perfection.

I want presence.

Live in Málaga made something clear to me that I had only suspected before: performing isn’t an extension of the music. It is one of the places where I understand myself best.