“I have a constant fear that my personality is not ‘famous person’ enough!”
The irony of musician Victoria Canal’s anxiety – which she candidly confides when she visits GLAMOUR HQ – is palpable, in the best way. Even though she has just released her debut album, Slowly, It Dawns, Victoria is already firm friends with Hollywood A-listers such as Tom Cruise, Bruce Springsteen and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. After performing with the band onstage at Glastonbury 2024, she seems a solid member of the créme de la créme, even if she’s concerned her persona may not fit the mold.
Victoria may be used to feeling different to others, however, having been born with a limb difference that meant she was born without her right forearm and hand, due to a condition called condition called amniotic band syndrome. She is an established guitar and piano player in spite of her difference, though, and credits her mum as the person who encouraged her to keep playing with both arms, her way.
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“There is a way to strum a guitar like this, and there is a way to play piano. But the thing is not many people, unless they really care about you, will push you to try. My mum said ‘you gotta play with your little arm too’, and that opened up a whole new world,” Victoria tells GLAMOUR. “Limitation is such a wonderful tool for creativity. When you have parameters around your choices, you find your voice in a way that I did upon learning piano and guitar… I have to be very selective and thoughtful about the colours and the voices and the feelings that I'm invoking through fewer notes, and that creates a simplicity.”
She sat down with GLAMOUR to talk A-list besties, the complexity of representing other people with disabilities, the damaging impact of being defined by your difference and misogyny in the music industry.
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Tell us about the influences around your debut album – does it say a lot about what era of your life that you’re in?
Slowly, It Dawns, for me, is all about navigating your 20s and getting older. The first half of the album is very brash and pop and overconfident in a way that I felt in my youth. As you get older, you become more self aware and maybe a little more wounded and a little more introverted and wiser, so the second half of the album is that version of me… I wanted to embrace all sides of myself, and I hope whoever listens to the album just feels permission to fully, fully allow every side of themselves.
What was it like to play with Coldplay at Glastonbury last year?
It was probably the most insane experience I'll ever have in my life. The performance itself was just so crazy fast, and backstage at a Coldplay show, there is every famous person under the sun. People ask me what it was like to perform, and honestly, what I remember more was the rehearsal, seeing one of the most successful bands work the way that they do up close behind the scenes was so shocking and inspiring. Everyone's so on their game and kind to each other, which was just so cool to see. I feel like I came away from it just feeling inspired to be better and to treat the people around me with respect.
The only reason I got to play was because, originally, I was just looking for tickets to Glastonbury, I texted Chris saying like, ‘I couldn’t find tickets. Could you get me in?’ And he called me like, ‘I got you one better. Why don't you play with us?’
What have you learnt about the underbelly of the celebrity world, having befriended quite a few A-listers like Chris Martin and Tom Cruise?
Everyone's just a person. I think that's the main thing, when you're growing up, these people feel like gods… But as I am growing up and just meeting people in the industry, they're just people, you know.
Also, I really value intergenerational friendships. I think it's something that's so often ignored or underappreciated, but there's something so valuable in learning from someone thirty, forty years older than you, that's in your industry, because they have so much wisdom, and they they're no longer concerned with proving themselves the way that so many people my age are. So it's been funny this last year, becoming friends with people like Tom Cruise, people are so weirded out and questioning that. And I'm like, ‘guys, make an older friend’. It's really valuable. He knows so much, and so does Michael J Fox and Bruce Springsteen.
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You’ve talked before about how writing songs about your disability helped you work through vulnerability and empowered you, can you tell us a bit about that?
I felt like I was always under represented or not represented at all on screen, and if I was it was as a joke or a pity story or something, shows like How I Met Your Mother or Friends, storylines that are like, ‘oh the girl with the missing leg’ and ‘oh my god, you dated a girl with a missing leg’ or whatever. I always felt really outcast and ugly and rejected. I had so many experiences of rejection because of my difference, and then as I got into music, I would just get asked about it all the time, but in a way that didn't really respect or consider people with disabilities in general. It can be quite tasteless to frame someone with a disability as inspiring or as some sort of tokenised version of making other people feel better about themselves, and that can be really damaging to your self esteem.
So I started writing music about my disability after so many years of playing the role of ‘I overcame it, and you can too’, and I spoke about the reality of the ways that I feel discriminated against, and also the ways that I feel like I get away with things where other people with more evident disabilities don’t. By writing music about it, and by speaking about it on my own terms, I felt much more empowered and confident in myself.
But I still cope with body image issues and I don't think that's unique to people with disabilities. I feel like there's so much overvaluing of beauty and undervaluing of morals and ethics, and at the same time, I want to feel the freedom to adorn my body in a way that makes me feel great. So it's all about finding that balance, and I'm still navigating it. It's a balance between embracing my disability because it's part of who I am, and not making it my whole thing because it's just not. I'm not constantly thinking about it, but I think maybe other people are when they think about me.
When it comes to being a symbol of representation for others with limb differences and disabilities, is that a lot of pressure, or ultimately empowering?
Everything depends on the day. I think being perceived in general is a challenge, and one of the things that I struggle most with is getting on stage and trusting that people want to see someone like me on stage and won't recoil or feel turned off by my appearance. That feeling that I still cope with gives me all the more motivation to push through it. Because if I feel this way, then I can't imagine how many other young women feel that and assume that they shouldn't be seen, that they need to hide away. So I do feel a certain responsibility to overcome my own inhibitions and self consciousness out of service to others.
Being seen for a living is weird. My favourite part of the job is when no one's watching and I'm in the studio and I'm creating.
Your Instagram posts have been described as prolific, what would you say your relationship with social media is like?
I’m definitely on my phone way too much and a victim of doom scrolling and comparing myself to others. So I have to be very thoughtful in how I spend my time, because you can easily lose hours and hours a day. I feel like social media, for me, is an amazing way to connect with like-minded people all over the world. You can be separated by distance but connected by interests, and that's a beautiful thing. I try to glean the positives out of it. Touring is really hard, and I'm still managing how much to do it versus how to retain my energy and stay home and preserve my mental health. So the fact that I can still share and publish my music without the draining nature of touring is always exciting.
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What lessons have you learned about taking care of your mental health?
I definitely have stretches of time that are really difficult. I have what I recently discovered is premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), and it basically means for seven to 10 days out of the month I am clinically depressed, and I'm navigating how to handle that. The main thing, I think, when it comes to mental health, as my therapist would tell me, is just allow what's there. Don't blame yourself for it, and don't be meaner to yourself than your brain is already being and then beyond that externally, the things that have helped me most are sauna and cold swimming. Cold swimming, beyond anything else, has been a lifesaver in terms of my mental health, because no matter what state you're in, if you get in shockingly cold water, your brain will just feel so alive. And it's hard to feel alive sometimes.
I think that the main thing for mental health is being surrounded by people that understand what you need. And when you don't, you learn how to lean on yourself in a gracious and patient way.
Following various waves of the #MeToo movement, do you feel like things are shifting for women in the music industry in terms of them becoming more empowered?
There's been a shift for women in the music industry, however it still feels really evident to me that there's a double standard across the board. If you're a man and you do something confident, you are perceived as confident. If you're a woman, and you do something confident, you're perceived as way too much, or as bossy or manipulative or controlling. I am constantly aware of my gender as I move through the world, which is a concern that I think men have the privilege of not worrying about. There are also such implicit undertones of misogyny every single day. That’s not just an industry wide thing, that's a society wide thing.
Women are sexualised so much more often than men are. It is constant. As a woman, you either feel like your beauty is all you have to offer and that everyone's looking at you to be as pretty as possible, or you feel like you're not as pretty as the next woman, and that that woman might receive more opportunity, respect, affection, attention than you because of the way that you look. So there's really no way to win. I myself have felt either objectified or invisible, and there has to be something that's not either of those things, that feels right and empowering and fair. And that space between being objectified and being invisible is where men stand.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Slowly, It Dawns is available to stream now.
