"The Otherside": Four countries join in all-girl collaboration
23 June 2015 at 19:06 CEST
Stephanie, Tamar, Elhaida, Elina and Maria Elena during the recording session in Vienna
Even though the weeks leading up to the Eurovision Song Contest are a particularly busy time for everyone involved, five artists representing different countries have found time to pursue a truly unique idea: In between all the rehearsals and press conferences, they recorded a song together! The initiative for this project was taken by Tamar Kaprelian, one of the members of Genealogy from Armenia. Today you can listen to The Otherside for the first time.
Elina Born from Estonia, Maria Elena Kyriakou from Greece, Elhaida Dani from Albania, Stephanie Topalian from Japan, and Tamar Kaprelian from the US (both of the latter representing Armenia in the 2015 Eurovision Song Contest) have joined forces in Vienna to record The Otherside together. Isn't that a wonderful way of Building Bridges, which has been the slogan of this year's contest? Today the official video has been premiered - watch it below!
So how was this idea born? Tamar Kaprelian explains: "The collaboration came together organically. I had been going back and forth with Elhaida Dani on social media (isn’t social media amazing?), a month or so before the competition, and I sent her a message saying that we should work together on a song. She suggested that we record something while we were in Vienna - which I thought was a great idea. So I sent her the MP3 of The Otherside - a song that had come out on my 2012 album Sinner or a Saint. She loved it."
But the idea went on to grow from this initial starting point, as Tamar tells us: "Then I figured, since it was the 60th anniversary for Eurovision, and since the theme this year was Building Bridges, why not invite a few other talented ladies to be a part of this as well! I had been speaking with Maria-Elena via Instagram -I loved her- so I invited her to join."
How about the other artists that joined the project? "I had fallen in love with Elina’s voice after I had heard the Estonian entry Goodbye to Yesterday and really wanted her to be involved too. Obviously, Stephanie -who was in Genealogy with me- was a no-brainer. I think the collaboration worked because we all have similar tones to our voices. That was important to me. There was definitely something magical when we were all the studio together. It felt right", Tamar told Eurovision.tv.
