Her Words, Her Heart

Andrea Frey is a former 417-lander now based in Mexico and bordering on pop stardom.

“Acoustic soul” is how Andrea Frey describes her music. She could use the phrase to describe her life, too: Never loud or brash, always straight from the heart.

She grew up in Springfield (partly), but her heart was and is in Mexico City, where she has lived off-and-on since she was 5 and where she resides with her parents today. Her family frequently moved due to their missionary work. Some days Frey sings at weddings with a lounge band, doing songs ranging from Sade’s “Sweetest Taboo” to bossa nova covers of Guns n’ Roses. It’s a fun job at times, but Frey’s heart isn’t in it. “I’m sick of singing covers,” she says.

Instead, that heart is in the pages of the notebooks where she keeps her lyrics. Frey is in the midst of recording her debut album, Todo Lo Que Soy, which means she’s traveling across Mexico City every time she wants to lay down some vocals in the studio.
In a way, Frey has been laying down vocals in enclosed spaces since she was 3. It began with Bobby Darin’s classic, “Splish Splash,” which Frey sang—where else?—in her bathtub every day growing up. Frey says she had a skin disease and took three baths a day to keep irritation down. She spent so much time in the bathtub by herself that she sang loudly to get attention.

People used to tell Frey that she should look into singing as a career, but she didn’t take them seriously. It wasn’t until she moved back to Mexico City in August 2003 that it began to happen. She met a man whom she describes as the most influential record producer in the city (she won’t give his name), who wanted to produce a single for her on the condition that it be done his way. She asked around. Other singers who had worked with the producer advised her not to do it, that he was terrible to work with and rarely gave a good effort. Instead, Frey began writing songs with a friend of hers, Güido Laris, a vocal coach who also produced the hugely famous Mexican pop act RBD. Frey says she wasn’t into Mexican pop, but Laris approached her about producing her album. Frey’s heart told her to go for it, and she’s been working full-time on it since February.

Recording an album can mean no-hour days, says Frey. It can also mean two-hour days and 20-hour days and all points in between. When it’s time for her to go into the studio, however, Frey arrives with her notebook in her hand and her heart on her sleeve. It’s that heart that’s reflected in her lyrics, such as the opening verse of “Todo Lo Que Soy:”

Lo que puedo dar/eso es todo lo que soy/si no
lo puedes ver/no te atreves volver

All I can give/that’s all that I am/if you can’t see
that/don’t you dare come back

Frey says she wrote the song in January of 2005 after the end of her first mature relationship. It was one of the first songs written for the album, and it remains one of her favorites today. She’s choosing from among 20 such songs to complete the album. Frey and Laris are also in talks with record labels such as Sony and EMI about distribution deals, hoping to bring it to record shelves in the United States as well as Mexico. Frey says her goal is to be a pop star who also builds a dedicated fan base over time. She’s not interested in being a one-hit, or even one-album, wonder. There’s no heart in that.