Ironically, that confidence is partially a product of
her experiences creating La Papessa years earlier,
meaning the record that nearly 200 influential Canadian
media types deemed the best of that year was, as far
as its creator is concerned, a stepping stone to some-
thing greater.
“I have an artistic instinct, and I learned to listen to
that instinct and to myself when I made La Papessa,” she
shares. “If you listen to that album front-to-back, you can
hear a lot of cooks [in the kitchen]; it was more exper-
imenting and trying things out. I had an opportunity to
make mistakes and grow, but that’s a thing of the past;
Miss Colombia is me now, and ready to be even better.”
Miss Colombia album art
Despite the distance between release dates and nota-
ble artistic contrasts, the stories behind La Papessa and
Miss Colombia actually weave through one another.
About five years ago, Pimienta moved from Lon-
don, ON, to Toronto as a newly single mom and met
a musician named Matt Smith – aka Prince Nifty – af-
ter his performance at a beloved but now-defunct arts
community hub in Bloordale Village. “I loved his beats,
loved the sound, and went up to him after and told him
I’d love to work together,” Pimienta recalls about the
fateful encounter, and it wasn’t long before they had
their chance.
In 2016, Pimienta impressed Smith with some demos
she’d been working on, so the two travelled to Santia-
go, Chile together in the fall to collaborate. “We had so
much fun,” Pimienta enthuses, noting that while Smith’s
workflow contrasts with her own, they were ultimately
rather complementary with one another.
Amidst their work, Pimienta realized she needed to
release the collection of songs she’d been sitting on for
a while to make good on a stipulation of her Ontario
Arts Council funding. With little fanfare, she put La Pa-
pessa online and went back to her new music.
Returning to Canada shortly thereafter, the buzz
around the LP – actually her second, following a prom-
ising debut, Color, from 2010 – was spreading. As at-
tention surrounding the project amassed, the songs she
and Nifty were working on were temporarily set aside.
La Papessa made its mark pre- and post-Polaris
frenzy, sending eyes and ears from all over in Pimienta’s
direction. Here was a gifted, self-assured, entirely inde-
pendent artist and woman of colour seemingly coming
out of nowhere (at least as far as the uninitiated were
concerned) with a brilliant, genre-bending sonic collage
sung primarily in Spanish. It wasn’t just novel for “Cana-
dian” music; hers was an unparalleled voice that drew
acclaim from all corners of the globe.
What’s more, she would readily and openly sound
off about the realities and circumstances shaping her
life and work – her identity as an Afro-Colombian with
indigenous roots raising her family in Canada, her expe-
riences with and opinions on the politics of race, sexu-
ality, and gender in a new country grappling hard with
all three.
Concurrent with the international praise for her art
came labels like “polarizing” and “controversial” for those
assertions; however, that usually revealed more about
who was saying it than who it was being said about.
Subsequently, La Papessa wasn’t just a lesson in
artistic and technical growth for Pimienta; it offered a
clear picture of her new reality as a public figure with a
multi-layered identity and, ultimately, a primer for some
of the musical and lyrical themes she explores on Miss
Colombia.
Pregnant through part of La Papessa’s support cy-
cle, Pimienta gave birth in the summer of 2018, enjoyed
a month of downtime with her newly-expanded family,
and then dialed Nifty to get back to work.
Phase one of that work was building a studio –
since dubbed Pipe Tocala – in the apartment below
hers. “On top of being a musical genius and all the
things that he is, he builds stuff, and he’s a sound en-
gineer, so he made me the most beautiful studio with
beautiful bass traps and [treatments] in the ceiling,” Pi-
mienta says about Nifty, who she calls her “partner and
mentor in creation.”
Phase two was getting back to the music, and they
dove in earnestly. “If you know me personally, you know
my life really revolves around my children, my family, my
home, so Nifty basically became another member of the
family,” Pimienta explains. “He would come for breakfast
and eat with us, we’d listen to records and get pumped
for the day of work… We spent a lot of time together.”
Miss Colombia was made over the following nine
months, mostly recorded and produced in Toronto but
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