Hideaway singer Kiesza on returning to music after her traumatic brain injury

In 2017, the Calgary musician Kiesza had just experienced a whirlwind three years. Her debut single, Hideaway, had become a massive hit, her music was everywhere and she even had the chance to perform at her dream venue, London's Wembley Stadium.

But Kiesza's career came to halt after she got in a car accident that resulted in a traumatic brain injury. She started experiencing excruciating headaches, a loss of balance on the left side of her body and her hands felt like they were on fire.

"My self as I knew it died," Kiesza tells Q's Tom Power on today's show. "I was preparing myself to lose everything."

On top of this, both her best friend and her producer for her new album had died that same year.

"I couldn't even think my way through [the grief] because if I over thought things or got stressed, my brain would then swell," Kiesza says. "The weirdest thing about a brain injury is you can't do anything. You have to try to do nothing [not] even think."

It took the Juno-winning artist a year and a half to start making any progress in her recovery. Because Kiesza couldn't do anything, she couldn't use her usual coping skills of writing songs or dancing to get through this hard time. Instead, she cried a lot.

"Crying became my dancing," Kiesza says. "It reset me in a similar way emotionally that a good dance would do. They're both very honest expressions of the body."

This became the inspiration for the title of Kiesza's newly released EP, Dancing and Crying: Vol. 1. The songs fuse the house and dance music of Hideaway with her roots as a folk singer-songwriter.

"I had to argue with Sugar Jesus, my producer, to put the banjo on Heaven Ain't Calling because he's like, 'You can't put banjo on a house track!" she says. "And I'm like, 'Yes, you can. I'm doing it.' And now everyone's like, 'I love the banjo.'"

Before Hideaway came out in 2014, Kiesza had never written a house track before. But when her producer at the time, Rami Samir Afuni, played a house track, she liked the sound of it. She freestyled the melody and then wrote the lyrics in less than 10 minutes. Afuni produced the whole song in 90 minutes.

"That was the fastest songwriting situation I think I ever experienced," she says.

At that point in her career, Kiesza had mainly been songwriting for other artists, including Kylie Minogue and Rihanna. There was talk of giving Hideaway to Mariah Carey, but Kiesza asked her team to hold on to it for her.

"I just couldn't even picture anyone on it," she says. "In an instant, I just knew that it was meant to be for me."

The full interview with Kieszais available onour podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview withKieszaproduced by Vanessa Nigro.