It’s been quite a year for Victoria Canal. Less than 12 months since she joined Coldplay onstage at Glastonbury in front of 250,000 fans, the 26-year-old songwriter has become a headliner in her own right. Her US tour this spring included stops at the Kennedy Center, LA’s legendary Troubadour, and other iconic venues. And Canal’s debut album, Slowly, It Dawns, has won over critics from Rolling Stone, Spin, and the LA Times since its release in mid-February.
Most impressive of all, she’s relegated her limb difference to an afterthought, commanding attention through the sheer quality of her music. Here are five things that have dawned on Canal over the last 12 months.
1. All music is soul music.
“My Cuban grandmother played piano and led the choir at her church,” Canal says. “When we would visit her, I would sit on her lap and watch her play. She was the first person to notice I had an interest in music, and she encouraged my parents to put me into lessons.” Canal now sports a tattoo bearing one of her grandmother’s favorite phrases: con alma (“with soul”). “That’s my main criterion as a songwriter,” Canal says. “Am I putting my soul into it? Am I reaching a deeper level of myself?”
2. Hearts belong on sleeves.
Canal wrestles to balance two contradictory impulses: the need to reveal her emotions honestly and shield herself from judgment. “Relatively few people admit to feeling the weight of self-doubt, perfectionism, depression, anxiety,” she says. “Saying them out loud is like an admittance of weakness. But ultimately, to be vulnerable is strong, and it is a way to reach people.” But then, it’s also a way for other people—including haters and trolls—to reach her, too. “I signed up to share myself for a job,” Canal shrugs. “It’s what I do.”
3. Beware of guardian angels.
Disability tends to trigger people’s care-taking instincts, Canal says, and while their compassion may be well-intentioned, it can do more harm than good. “If everyone’s coming to your rescue, it limits the muscle you build to believe in yourself,” Canal says. “I think it’s necessary to self-impose certain challenges when you’re someone with a disability, because people aren’t ever going to impose those challenges on you. They would much rather save you out of pity, and I am allergic to pity.”
4. Limitations are liberating.
As a five-fingered instrumentalist, Canal elevates tone and texture over technical chops. “I might not be the most dexterous piano player,” she says, “but I only sound like me. There’s no other piano player that’s going to sound like that, and part of the reason is because I make very specific choices based on my limb difference.” They’re choices that might never occur to a more conventional artist, but in Canal’s well-crafted tunes, they sound not only natural but inevitable.
5. Talk is cheap.
Type “Victoria Canal” into Google, and “Victoria Canal Tom Cruise” will appear in the autosuggest list. That’s because The Sun and Page Six published rumors last summer that the pair had become “inseparable” after meeting backstage at Glastonbury. While it’s true they hung out (Cruise even invited Canal to the set of Mission: Impossible 8), they were never romantically involved. “I am not dating the man,” she wrote on Instagram. “LOL, never thought I would have to clarify that out loud.”
