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2022 Coachella festival has ended, but attendees will remember this year’s performances forever. Latinx and Hispanic artists owned the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and gave fans their all, including Anitta, that revealed how she was able to bring her vision to life.
Following her electrifying performance during the first weekend, Anitta stopped by at Apple Music 1 to share with Zane Lowe why hiring a Disney World engineer was crucial for her show and how she’s approached weekend two differently. The Brazilian performer also shared details about her new album, Versions of Me.
According to Anitta, she approached weekend two of Coachella with another mindset. After being too nervous at her first show, the singer said that having fun was her goal. “A hundred percent going to have more fun because I was very nervous,” she said. “Because for my country and everyone is saying that to me, it felt like a world cup. It felt like a world cup for them. It was the first time.”
Knowing that Brazilians were paying attention to her show, Anitta made sure to make her nation proud; therefore, she brought a Disney World engineer to help craft her set. “I just wanted to bring my culture. I just feel like Brazilian people, we know how to party, we know how to enjoy the moment and ensure in that environment and just make everyone feel welcome and feel like they want to be part of it,” she told Apple Music.
Adding, “So, I built a show... Since the beginning, whenever I was thinking about it, six months ago, I was in Disney World with my mom. And my favorite park is Animal Kingdom, and I was like, “Oh my God, I just love how we feel immersed in this. We just feel the magic, and we feel like we are part of each movie or each ride and blah, blah, blah.’ So, I got home, and I started to watch this documentary of the behind-the-scenes, how they build the parks, and I said, ‘Okay, I want this guy. His name is Joe.’”
Anitta didn’t want to transform the stage into a fantasy castle or have a carriage; she wanted something real that brought her home to California. “He was explaining how he brought the environment of Avatar, the movie, to the Pandora Park in the park, and I was like, ‘Okay, I need this guy to tell me how can I bring the favela to the stage?’”
The 29-year-old Rio de Janeiro native said that “immersive” was the keyword for her Coachella set. “So, on the whole documentary, he’s talking about how he made people feel immersed in Pandora when you walk into the ride and when you walk into the area of the park, how he made people feel the energy,” she explains. “And I was like, ‘Okay, I want someone that makes the audience feel the energy of the favela.’ So, I started to tell him about my culture, about how we feel when we party in Brazil. So, I had some ideas.”
The star said she was committed to making her dreams a reality. “I wanted to make this because I’m always changing, and that’s my personality, as I just said, so I wanted a stage that could change without people not even notice but still keep being the same thing,” she continued explaining that Joe “had this idea of these triangles, that you were looking at the favela, and you’re like, ‘Okay, that’s the scenario.’ And then boom, it changes again, and then it changes again… I loved it.”
Anitta, whose real name is Larissa de Macedo Machado, also spoke about her different sides and how it reflects on her new album Versions of Me . “I think I just wanted to show my personality. And I’m very like that, as I just said. I’m very spontaneous; I like to follow the flow, go with the flow naturally,” the star says.
The singer and dancer said the album shows her country’s diversity. “I grew up in Brazil. We have a huge mixed culture, and I just didn’t want to choose a rhythm or choose a style and do that because that’s very against who I am because I just like to wake up and decide, “Who am I today? Am I going to be romantic? Am I going to be crazy? And I think my album needed to be like that. Each song is very particular, and I can’t define it. It’s just, I’m too complex just to choose one style and follow it,” she reveals.
Anitta is super proud of her roots and Brazilian fandom; however, she wanted to test other waters. “I was super, super nervous because it’s a huge country. It’s almost 300 million people, so it’s not easy for you to risk all of [what] you built and just get out and try to do new stuff,” she said.
“It’s really hard for you to risk that and to deal with all the critics and the frustration of the fans. And you got to manage them and be like, ‘Yo, listen, that’s going to happen.’ And I just created a very intimate contact with my fans. So I just try to be very close to my fans still, even though I was singing in another language. My fans love listening to me in Spanish and English,” she assures.
“They started learning different languages because of me, and it’s amazing. So, I understood that it would take more time because I couldn’t be comparing my work with any other artists that are dedicating their works, a hundred percent of the time, to one market. I will be sharing my market sharing my time between English, Portuguese, and Spanish. And then, as soon as I understood that and stopped feeling like the rush or the pressure to be in a chart, everything started to go right.”