In terms of genre, how would you define the relation of your originals with the covers you do?
My originals are of course, more personal and I want to focus more on creating originals, music videos once I get some time & space.
I really can’t explain one genre at the moment. Earlier I wanted to go R&B like artists such as Frank Ocean and Solange from the indie world, but then when I sat down to write down songs I started to get stuck because I was bound to an image, that it has to sound like this. Then I started experimenting with different instruments and what sounded good to me and at the same time unique. I don’t want be called an “indie” artist.
What is your direction in terms of writing your songs?
I always want to represent a feeling & it’s always personal. Everything in my songs doesn’t have to be really true, but I want to represent a feeling in my songs and I want to do that by writing about incidents that really happened to me, but sometimes I want to imagine scenes or pictures and then I decide if that’s the feeling I want to represent in my songs.
Were you scared when you discovered your unique voice? How did you know this is how you wanted to sing like?
When I was really young I was always trying to find my own voice, something unique. That was mostly during the time I started doing the covers. And I would kind of mimic the vocals or the tricks. I really don’t think there was a recipe, but then with time you discover and you find your own tone. When I was a very young I felt my voice was bit boring & that’s one of the reasons I did a lot of experimenting with my singing until I started feeling good about it. But you really have to spend a lot of time with it.
What is Korantemaa?
When I started uploading on YouTube, I started doing Swedish songs and felt that my name was kind of boring, so I wanted to figure out a cool & unique name and then I chose my middle name.
How did you discover your management, were you looking for someone? Were there any record labels approaching you?
I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging about myself, but when I was exploding on my YouTube channel, I started getting a lot of people contacting me. A lot of the record labels started sending me contracts, but I felt currently I wanted to stay independent and not sign with a label, as yet. I felt that if I was going to sign a label it might change my direction and I wasn’t currently ready for it.
Are you producing anything at the moment?
Yes, I am producing one of my originals this summer with a team in Denmark. Once it is done, I would love to work on the music video. I really love what Solange is doing with her music videos as a director. But I also have an idea of a music video to kind of make it like a “short film” and also somehow make it part of my school project. I haven’t done the planning yet. Once the song is ready, I would concentrate on the video.
