- Words Miriam Balanescu
Sugar-sweet singer-songwriter Anja Kotar serves up her response to the pandemic, the ‘Songs From Isolation’ EP.
Since her debut in 2019, Anja Kotar has dished up sugar-coated singles which beam with her sunny vocals.
This year, Kotar has unveiled her debut EP and it’s firmly rooted in the present times. Aptly named ‘Songs From Isolation’, the bundle of singles put a positive twist on what’s been a universally gruelling moment. “Tuscany”, “Alone Together”, and “Love Song” remain close to Kotar’s romantically inclined musical aesthetic, while “Midnight in Paris” makes direct reference to the city of love.
On the lead single, Kotar has said “‘Midnight in Paris’ is about the celebration of post-Covid life, portrayed as dancing through the night streets of Paris. I like to think of it as a sister song to Tuscany – that one opens the EP and Paris closes it off. Tuscany was written very soon after the gravity of this pandemic started dawning on the world and served as a daydream escape from the increasingly gloomy reality. Midnight in Paris, on the other hand, comes at a much more hopeful time when there is a light at the end of the tunnel. After enduring through a year of lockdowns and our lives being turned on their heads, now, dancing through Paris seems less of a mental escape and more of a reality in planning.”
On ‘Songs From Isolation’, Kotar adds: “When the Covid pandemic took over the world in early 2020, I moved back home with my parents in San Jose and found myself wandering around the house, playing Sims, binging on TV shows and bending over backwards to find ways to distract myself from the supersonic speed the world outside had started to change at. Pretty quickly, however, it became impossible to ignore the obvious: this was going to be a cataclysmic event in human history and I knew I would never forgive myself if I hadn’t documented it in the best way I knew how: through music.”
“Each song, to me, represents a different part of the pandemic – from the initial stage of denial, to ‘we might as well make the best of it’, to the sudden realization of this new reality and then the cautious optimism and hopefulness that life was slowly crawling towards what we had known for our entire lives. I like to think of this EP as a diary of this time, each song representing a different emotion, a different chapter. I guess in my romanticized future, I play this to my kids one day to show them what life was like for me during *that* global pandemic, then watch them roll their eyes with an ‘oh my god mom, not again’.”