Music

Toronto R&B songstress Andreena finds her own voice

by Erika Jarvis

When Toronto native Andreena was small, she hated the sound of her own voice. She expressed herself through childlike raps until her father, a professional reggae musician, said: “We all know you can sing. Just sing.”

In her hometown, some think she is the most slept-on R&B act in the city. Andreena’s latest album, Naked, demonstrates why: Over an hour of pure R&B, Andreena creates an uncompromising longform confession with her wildly capable voice. It includes a breakup, a move back to Toronto from Los Angeles, explicit sex, and an ode to simple adult pleasure (“Mary”).

“Sometimes when I sit back and listen to it, I think, Why did I say that?!” she says. “But I know there are women who can connect to my music, so I feel I have the responsibility to be open about all aspects, whether it’s love, sex, hate—you have to be able to relate.”

Outside Canada, Andreena might still be most widely known as the owner of the killer pipes on “Closer” and “The Last Hope” from Drake’s smash 2007 mixtape, Comeback Season. But she was discovered years before, in middle school, by a supply teacher who gave her a detention and noticed her writing a song in her notebook. He asked if she sang. Soon after, with the blessing of her parents, he would invite her to become a member of Toronto’s answer to TLC: A poppy urban trio called X-Quisite, which also included a young Melanie Fiona. Andreena balanced her commitments to the group with school, often putting on her makeup in the cafeteria before doing a performance for television.

After X-Quisite broke up in 2005, Andreena worked intensively with Canadian rap names Saukrates, Boi 1da, and Kardinal Offishall. They helped mold the young singer into a songwriter-producer triple threat, teaching her that when creating, “everything is a feeling,” and that “if you can’t move to it, go on to the next song.”

After Andreena’s first mixtape, Ready To Fly, came out in 2009, she scored a deal with Universal Publishing and moved to LA, where she wrote for and performed with people like DMX. But the LA stories proved too true, and Andreena watched the exploitation that happened by others when hunger gave way to desperation. She says her Toronto music-biz foundation gave her a protective shell of self-belief.

The majority of Naked was written and co-produced by Andreena, a process that she says required being somewhere she could be herself—at home in Toronto. “An album like Naked could not have been written anywhere else.”