Traveling miles from Switzerland, singer-songwriter, Veronica Fusaro receives a very warm Texas greeting starting her first day in Austin, Tx with a cheese and steak quesadilla. From noticing how welcoming and friendly people in Texas are we made sure she added Whataburger to her list of places to try. Veronica Fusaro flew on a 12-hour flight ready to take the stage at Stephen F’s Bar for SXSW, but before her performance, she stopped by KVRX to talk about her journey of writing music.
“Well, I've always loved to make music, so it was always around. I started writing songs in the sixth grade or something like that. Then I started playing shows, and the idea of doing music as a job just became more and more a thing.”
As her music became something more serious for Veronica, she entered competitions to show others her talent.
“I submitted one of my demos to a competition in Switzerland called “Demotape Clinic” at the Music Festival. I ended up winning the whole demo of the year thing, and I had no idea. I was there sitting in the audience like, “Oh, cool, nice.” But I would have never imagined when it started to enroll for the national radio in Switzerland, they started playing my songs. And it just started rolling, basically. And that's where I would say, the professional career as a musician started properly.”
Once her professional music career took off she started finding her sound, describing her music as “pop, honest, and real.” She mentions how growing up in Switzerland has impacted her music along with the influence that some of her favorite artists have on her sound.
“I grew up in Thun, there's not a lot going on in this city. So, it's like I don't know in the US is probably not even a city because it's like 45,000 people, so it's quite small. But in Switzerland, it's the cities. There wasn't a lot of distraction going on. Basically, I think I was able to really focus on music and the things that I love. But in terms of music itself, my inspirations have always been big artists like Lana Del Rey, Amy Winehouse, I love Amy Winehouse. I love Aretha Franklin. And many many more but just artists that were you know, touring globally that were coming from the US or the UK mainly.”
Veronica mentioned Lana Del Rey as one of her biggest inspirations, and I also noticed that The 1975 was mentioned in her Spotify bio as another inspiration of hers so I had to ask about her favorite songs of theirs.
She immediately starts singing “Somebody Else” by The 1975, “I love that song so much because I have so many memories of it, so many late-night drives.” For Lana Del Rey, “Oh my gosh, that's the harder that's the hardest one. I love the whole “Norman f**king Rockwell” album. The whole album is really great. The greatest, I love that song especially.”
After bonding over Veronica’s favorite songs, we discussed how her identity influences her music.
“It's just the music that I make is literally me, it's my problems, my thoughts, the things that bother me, things that won’t let me sleep, my relationship with the world, and with people and stuff that I go through.”
Writing music has turned into an outlet for Veronica to express herself, and has allowed her to create her amazing album, which she describes as her “best friend.”
“Yeah, it's like my best friends. Honestly. I don't know what I would do without the music. I'll be doing not so good. It's just something. It's not the words. It's not the music itself. It's the combination for me. I mean music as a whole is- I'm just grateful for music. It's so good.”
Her love for music was so big that she decided to take the risk of putting a pause on school to focus on music full-time.
“Oh, it was a moment of like, okay, am I doing this? So, in Switzerland, it's very much like, you should go for the safe option, for us we're very secure people I feel. So, being basically a freelance, working person, a musician exactly, is a big thing. Because I only had a high school. diploma. But I'm not regretting it, so it’s all good.
Leaving school was a big step for Veronica and had her dad feeling unsure about this decision but has ultimately been supportive of her decisions.
“My dad's he's Italian, so he's also very much you go to uni, you finish your studies, and then you can do whatever. But, there were a few discussions like, you sure you want to do this? etc. But yeah, and then at the end he's like, “Oh, you know, you do your things.” And he's also been very supportive of what I do. And he's very proud, so that helped me also, you know.”
Now having the time to write, Veronica released an album. She explains the growth she experienced while writing her album, “All the Colors of the Sky.”
“So as it is my first album, it has a lot of time. I think the oldest song on the album I wrote six years ago, a song called “Wreck Me,” and the newest one called, “Don't Be So Hard on Yourself,” I wrote at the beginning of 2022 or 2021…I'm not sure anymore. Anyway, but there's a lot of growth throughout the writing of this album, personally, musically, and everything. So it was a very, very nice process, you know, ,n.gray days and rainy days, but also very sunny days and beautiful feelings, like getting to experience for the first time in the studio, like a string section of three people playing my songs is like, huh, that's beautiful. That's one of my dreams, you know, little dreams come true. And it was a really, really beautiful process.”
Continuing on her beautiful process of writing for the album, she elaborates on her writing process for this album.
“For the most part when I write music, it's mostly me a guitar or piano, and just literally writing down the lyrics to the songs of emotions that I'm feeling. And then a second step is recording it onto Logic. Then I start to think of the arrangements, I add some drums and some strings, a really crappy plugin, and the demos sound terrible, but the idea is there and it's all about the idea. And then I take this and then I go to the producer, and then we figure out the rest.”
Producing all these wonderful songs, she then explains how it was tough figuring out the order in which the songs are listed in the album. She assigned a certain climate/color to each song to help determine the order.
“That was a long process. Yeah, it's tough because I care a lot about albums and I care a lot about the sequence. I tried to make a storyline, the theme is “All the Colors of the Sky. For me, each song of the album has a color or a certain climate, basically, weather because it's a metaphor, but also like the song “Grey Colored Sky” was actually a very rainy cloudy day, the day I wrote it. I tried to make the story and so the album was like, a world.”
For Veronica, her album, “All the Colors of the Sky,” was inspired by her life experiences and anything that was happening in the world.
“It's literally life, whatever happens to me, whatever doesn't make me sleep at night. I just write about it. Whatever I see in the world that is bugging me, whatever I care about, I write about, that's the inspiration for songs from the album. Sometimes it's sad emotions. Sometimes it's self-confidence, like, kick-a** feeling and share it and put it onto a song. And sometimes it's just like, looking out into society and being like, What? Why? This is not cool. Let me write a song about it.”
Releasing new songs calls for releasing music videos, Veronica takes us through the process of creating her music video for her song, “Weekend.”
“It's it was a lot of fun, we shot the video within a day too. I got into makeup at like 7 am and then we finished at 2 am…I think, but it was fun, which is good because the team was great. And I basically did the video with these guys called Films For Reel. I did a few other videos with them already, so we were familiar with each other, the way we work, and stuff. I really appreciate that because when you know people you can get to the goal faster. Because you know how they think and vice versa. We just had a bunch of calls and meetings, they had this storyline idea. And we were like, Yeah, Sure. Let's go for it. Let's do that.”
Before a show, Veronica takes a few minutes to herself to calm her nerves down. Playing with a band brings her so much excitement that it recently has been making her nervous before stepping on the stage.
“I do get nervous…especially lately, funnily enough, I've been playing with the bands. The album is basically with my new band, and I feel more excited and more nervous than usual. So what's really important for me is having 15 ideally, 30 minutes before the show for myself, just like, breathe, calm myself down, have a tea maybe. And no coffee, because usually coffee doesn't affect me. But for shows, it does get me more jittery. But yeah, that's half an hour for myself is like, the thing I need.”
She expresses that playing with a band has made her shows so special. Veronica met her band members in Switzerland and through social media.
“So the band in Switzerland back home, they're mostly from close to where I live. The drummer I knew before I played with him three years ago is a really cool guy. The keys player, the drummer, and the guitarist, we came across through a friend of my manager and we played together and etc. And the bassist I found on Instagram. The socials are sometimes a good thing!”
Veronica Fusaro recently released her album and was set to perform at SXSW on Wednesday, March 15. She has a song for every emotion that you may be feeling, so go check out her stuff!
“If you want to listen to it that will make me super, super happy.”
Thank you to Veronica Fusaro for letting me interview her. She was so kind and down to earth. I hope your time at SXSW was amazing and I hope you were able to try Whataburger during your time here in Texas!