Alisa Amador confronts her depression in new song 'Woke Up Today'

Time and time again, Boston-based musician Alisa Amador has found the right words for the moment — a challenging skill, even for many practiced songwriters. Last year, her song “Milonga Accidental” propelled her to win NPR’s 2022 Tiny Desk Contest, and her Tiny Desk performance brought in hundreds of thousands of views. While that catapulting experience introduced a wider audience to her music, this kind of success often puts an artist in a consequential position. With more eyes on them than ever before, the question is: What’s the next move?

For Amador, it's been an international tour and new music. Her single “Woke Up Today” is the first original music she’s put out since her 2021 EP “Narratives.” Amador wrote the song to confront her own grief and depression and found self-acceptance along the way. “‘Narratives’ was just the beginning of my process of learning to truly be myself as an artist,” Amador said. “And that means not ascribing to one genre or strictly one language. Now this next release, ‘Woke Up Today,’ is like another step deeper into that process for me. … It feels like the most vulnerable song that I have to date.”

Amador’s struggle with depression reached a boiling point during the first summer of the pandemic. “I was really struggling with the lockdown — with mental health, with grief and with just a really mean self-talk. Really mean,” Amador said. On the day she wrote “Woke Up Today,” she had been attending one of those pandemic parties where people congregated and attempted to celebrate from the safety of a parked car. She spilled wine while sitting in her partner’s car and emotionally spiraled. “I was so hard on myself about this very human mistake. People spill things all the time.” She left the party and tried to console herself at home. “I remember sitting in the dark, crying, crying and feeling like I'm just so bad at everything and I don't know if I'm ever going to feel all right.”

With that, Amador wrote the first verse: “Woke up today feeling like I’d never be alright/ Tried to shake the nightmare as it echoed through my mind/ Tried to break my record of trying not to cry/ Tried to recognize myself in the looking glass of life.” Looking back, Amador said this line feels poignant. “That was a moment of recognition before I was maybe ready to recognize that what I was feeling was depression.”

"Imagine suddenly touring and interviewing with press constantly, while also struggling to understand why you have sudden moments of exhaustion and sadness."

Alisa Amador

This song and the mental health challenges that inspired it stayed with Amador and became more apparent over the last three years. “The year after my Tiny Desk win was beautiful and very challenging, as I learned how to navigate this new chapter of my career while also coming to terms with my need for more mental health care,” Amador said via email. “Imagine suddenly touring and interviewing with press constantly, while also struggling to understand why you have sudden moments of exhaustion and sadness. It was a beautiful year, but also very tough.”

This May, Amador had a breakthrough, thanks in part to medication. She can see and feel the difference, which is evident to her when looking back at her old journal entries. “At the end, I always [used to] write, ‘I don't know how, but somehow it's going to be okay.’ That was the ending of my journal entries for the last, like, three years until I started an antidepressant only recently. And it's been like this magical thing where now I don't just believe that somehow it's going to be okay, I actually feel like it's okay.” Amador added that she recognizes medication doesn’t work in this way for everyone, and she encourages people struggling with mental illness to use available resources.

For Amador, songwriting was one of those healing resources. “Writing songs put the mirror up to myself and whether I'm ready to face it or not, I start to see what's really going on,” she said. “And that is a really essential healing modality for me, and my hope in sharing songs like this one is that they can be one of the many healing modalities that people can lean on when they need support.”

"Writing songs put the mirror up to myself and whether I'm ready to face it or not, I start to see what's really going on."

Alisa Amador

Amador recorded her singing and guitar playing in a studio in Los Angeles, working with producer-musician Tyler Chester, who played synth and gathered a string quartet for the production. To help mix the track, Amador turned to Boston-based musician Daniel Radin of Future Teens. She worked closely with the team behind the studio track to introduce sounds and effects that are new to her discography. In “Woke Up Today,” Amador incorporates these elements to allow her to add another layer of narrative dimension. These subtle, swelling instrumentations demonstrate an artist exploring the tools around her while keeping true to her roots as a singer-songwriter with a background in Latin folk music.

Amador’s reflection and introspection have resulted in a song that shows her growth as an artist and person. Jumping with both feet into self-discovery and sound exploration, she uncompromisingly sticks the landing. While quite a bit has changed since her last original release two years ago, in many ways, she’s still the curiously playful 7-year-old girl singing backup in her family’s touring folk band, Sol y Canto.

Twenty years later, Amador has tuned her ear more finely to her inner thoughts: depression, glimmers of hope and all. In this song, Amador generously brings us along her journey: “Tried to fall in love with all the pieces of my life/  Woke up today, feeling I just might.”