Toronto (Canada) based artist, Anya Mia, has just released her latest single, Watching You, and we’ve been taking a listen today here at the Send Me Your Ears studio.
Watching You is a love song from Artificial Intelligence to the human race… “I’ve been watching you”. A great Big Brother feeling theme with a bluesy jazzy groove.
Watching You starts gently with jazzy drums and a funky bassline. It has a real laid back feel. Some keys are added to help add to the funky feel and we like how there is just a touch of drive on the keys to give them a bit of extra power and interest.
There’s some lovely flute incidentals throughout the song. Panned left and feeling a touch “Canned Heat” style. A simple but effective flute solo sits nicely in the middle of the track as well.
Anya’s voice is powerful and has just the right amount of rasp to make it a really strong bluesy voice. Joanne Shaw Taylor sprang to mind in places. Clearly an accomplished blues vocalist, Anya has all the tricks in her arsenal to make a name for herself on the Canadian Blues scene. There seems to have been a bit of a resurgence of female blues vocalists on the Canadian scene at the moment with JJ Wilde, for example, leading the pack.
Watching You is a song with a typical blues sequence and one which feels familiar right from the start. It would have been nice, from our perspective, to have heard just a touch more development as the song progressed. Perhaps some additional instruments or changes during the second verse. As it stands, however, this is a song which we feel would work well in the background of a TV show. Perhaps a sci-fi that touches on its subject matter. We feel that Anya would be wise to seek out any sync opportunities to gain maximum exposure for this track.
From a production perspective, we would love to have heard those vocals much further forward in the mix. Some extra compression would help with this. A low shelf boost around 90Hz would bring out some extra warmth in the track. We feel like a lot can be done to bring out the overall presence in the track. A large and wide boost across the high mids and highs centred around 9kHz with an additional high shelf boost in the top octave would give the track much more brightness and definition. The track is very quiet too in comparison to other similar releases so a light compressor with a fair bit of make up gain is needed.
Watching You is a funky, lo-fi, Canadian blues track with some great performances on vocals from Anya Mia. We’re looking forward to hearing where Anya takes her career next.