How Cancer and Mental Health Shaped Artist Luiza Girardello’s Musical Truth

For some, music is a hobby. For others, it’s a lifeline. Luiza Girardello falls into the latter category.

Before the Brazilian-born artist graduated from the Berklee College of Music in Boston or started recording her debut album, she was writing songs to help her survive one of the most difficult periods of her life.

“The mental health crisis happened during chemotherapy in 2014,” she says. Although music has been a part of her life from the beginning, Girardello hadn’t written an original song until this point.

“Looking back, I’d tell the version of myself who wrote that first song in between chemo sessions, ‘You can write as many songs as you want. This one doesn’t have to be perfect. It is by making bad things that we learn how to make better things.’”

Today, Girardello’s music still reflects the themes of overcoming adversity, but it’s also a testament to her cultural background. Many of her songs have a clear Brazilian influence that collides with her own focus on jazz and alt-rock.

Her song “Conversa Fiada” (“Small Talk”) is probably the clearest example of this unique kind of fusion. “I wrote the song as a baião (a rhythm from the north of Brazil) and considered arranging it as a straight-up traditional baião,” she says. 

“My co-producer, João Vitor Costa Dias, who musically directed my senior recital with me when we first worked on these compositions, suggested adding more of a rock feel to it, as well as an Afro-Cuban rhythm to the chorus for variation,” she continues. “The result is an arrangement that sounds very Brazilian but still contains these more rock/heavier sounds.”

Girardello’s genre-defying sound has become part of her signature as an artist, but so has her lyrical complexity and incisive social commentary.

“I knew I wanted to write a song about how hard social interactions — especially small talk — became after the pandemic,” she says of the process behind “Conversa Fiada.” “I thought the way to do it would be by contrasting the small talk in the verses with a list of seemingly unrelated topics for deep conversation in the chorus.”

Girardello’s music has been influenced by a variety of challenges from her own life: her cancer diagnosis, a concurrent mental health crisis, and the often-alienating experience of being a Brazilian artist integrating into American culture. It’s also been shaped by a number of different artists and musical genres.

The sheer variety of her work sometimes makes it challenging to put together a cohesive album or setlist. However, when it came time for her Berklee senior recital, Girardello and her band had a moment of clarity.

“Part of the challenge is that I have too many different influences and tend to write songs in very different styles. We decided since there wasn’t exactly a through line connecting all the songs stylistically, we would lean on that and use it to tie it together,” she reflects. “The through line was that there was no through line.”