Ava Maria Safai was hanging out in her dorm room one evening when her life changed.
It was a normal night for the 19-year-old University of British Columbia student: she’d been surfing the web, watching clips on YouTube, and perhaps mulling over her course work for her duel degrees in acting and English literature. But suddenly her interest was piqued after stumbling on a video containing a PSA from a popular reality TV show.
“I came across this video of one of the stars of the show … putting out a call for music,” she explains, noting that she uses “Ava Maria” as her stage name.
After messaging the production team for Dance Moms, a reality show about the early dance training and careers of children in show business, she finally got a reply. The show would feature her song “Finding Hope” in its upcoming season finale, according to Maria.
She had written and recorded the song years’ prior, but when the track made its big stage debut on Dance Moms in February 2017 things positively exploded for the student, self-described drama queen, and budding musician.
“Honestly it was like a wild experience for me initially because nobody really knew who I was, and I was just kind of this North Van drama kid who went to school and wrote songs on her own time, and then like overnight – really after the episode premiered – the views came flooding in and the comments came flooding in,” she says.
On Maria’s YouTube channel, the song has more than 200,000 views following its huge transnational exposure. On the Lifetime Network YouTube channel, which broadcast Dance Moms, the scene that features Maria’s song has been viewed more than one million times.
“I kind of gained a fan base from that,” she says, adding that in the wake of that initial brush with success she’s poised to release her debut album later this month.
“After so much asking and communicating with the people that were interested in my music I decided to record my album,” she says. “That’s what I did over the past couple months and then that’s coming out at the end of July.”
That debut album, titled We’ve Got Issues, will feature 10 original songs featuring the soaring vocals, delicate piano strokes, and lush production that made “Finding Hope” such a resounding success.
Each track on the album will feature the singer sounding off on issues that she has either faced personally, or that affect society at large, Maria says.
“There’s tracks about mass shootings, there’s tracks about mental illness, there’s tracks about losing people. … Each one was written during a different phase in my life. I didn’t write the whole thing in a night, some of the songs are from when I was 12 and some of the songs are from when I was 19,” she says.
Maria was bit by the songwriting bug at age 11, one piece of the puzzle on her lifelong journey when it comes to exploring the arts.
“When people ask me what I want to do when I grow up I always tell them that I want to be a professional storyteller and to me that doesn’t matter if I’m doing it through music or through acting of through writing. If I can do it any way, then I’m happy to do it,” she says.
She’s content in continuing to use music to tell that story, she explains, noting that the songs and the act of writing them helped her when she was experiencing depression and mental health issues when she was younger.
“I started taking all that pain and all the ideas that were in my head and putting them on paper,” she says, adding the greatest satisfaction came after her “Finding Hope” single found stratospheric levels of popularity and could reach people that were previously unreachable to her.
“I got so many comments from people that were saying that they had cancer or a family member had just passed away or something hard had happened in their life, and the song helped them get through that. That was just a very full-circle moment for me because I was totally in that place a couple years ago,” she says.
Maria is hosting an album release concert at the Red Gate Revue Stage in Vancouver on July 28. Visit avamariasafai.com for tickets or more information.
