Writing through Synesthesia with Avery Raquel

Returning recently from Europe, where she performed, and earned her master’s degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain, Canadian Billboard-charting recording artist and alternative Soul singer Avery Raquel has entertained audiences professionally for over a decade.

She’s released 4 solo albums and two EPs now to critical acclaim. Her last self-titled release debuted on the Canadian iTunes Top 200 RnB/Soul album chart at #5. Five tracks from that album were finalists in the John Lennon Songwriting Competition in 2022 and 2023 in 4 different categories, with one winning the Grand Prize in the Pop category. Her latest single from her new EP ‘Scratching At The Surface’ was a recent finalist in the same competition.

Relatable, yet personal, Avery’s writing is a soulful fun mix of RnB/Soul, Funk, and Pop, with a flavour of her Jazz and Blues experiences.

Avery talked about writing songs after learning she has Synesthesia, an umbrella term for the intersection of senses. She shared her master’s thesis song, Guests. Download the lyrics to follow along.

We talked about:

• Our songwriting challenge for 2024 to write a holiday song. Please send us your answers to the challenge by November 18!
• Congratulations to our recent guest Jade Turner for winning the Vince Fontaine Indigenous Song Award from SOCAN for her track This Song Sucks
• How Avery uses her chromathesia condition (a type of synesthesia in which sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color, shape, and movement) to decide upon chord choices
• How everybody who experiences Synethesia (Synesthetes) experiences it differently  – like for Avery, major seventh chords always invoke sunset orange and minor seventh chords are dark blue
• Personifying emotions and incorporating I, You, He, and She in your song
• Writing a song like a jazz standard with a nursery rhyme quality
• Famous musicians who also have Synesthesia
• Talking about music (is like dancing about architecture)