Missy Alcazar is a Filipina-American multi-instrumentalist and true renaissance woman. She began playing piano at the age of four. Since her mother was a Filipina immigrant and born in a third world country, learning piano was only for the wealthy and she was determined to make sure her daughter was a pianist.
Citing she has been living and breathing music her entire life, after graduating college she quit piano to become an amateur snowboarder. After a two-year break and a lot of dislocated bones, she re-discovered her passion for music. It was a creative outlet she needed, “I went back to school to get my MFA in Piano Performance and took a songwriting workshop. I learned how to record in the new recording class offered at CalArts in 2011 and that’s when I knew I wanted to pursue songwriting,” she notes.
There’s a sense of magic with Missy Alcazar’s songwriting. “I just know how it makes me feel when I’m able to express my emotions through a melodic passage on the piano. Or how I am able to express some of the excruciating pain I get through the resonance of strings or a cluster chord,” she notes. She’s a force to be reckoned with.
She released her debut EP, Come Love Me, in 2018. This saw her acclaim nomination for Best Singer Songwriter at the 2019 San Diego Music Awards. In 2019, she released her follow-up EP, Goodbye, dedicated to the struggles of grief of losing her mother to cancer.
Currently, she is working on her first full-length studio album titled, Figuring It Out, which is set to be released later this year. This album is dedicated to the ‘Project Semicolon’, non-profit movement dedicated to presenting hope to those who are struggling with mental health, suicide, self-injury, and addiction.
Missy Alcazar says the forthcoming album was written in 2020, when she began streaming on Twitch. Initially, it was to be an EP with six-tracks to-be-released in 2021, “but the universe had other plans.” As she has always wanted to create a full-length album, this was the first project she completely funded and inspired by my Twitch community.
The driving theme of the album is her own experience healing from grief, trauma, living with anxiety, and PTSD while learning self love and acceptance. It’s the first album she feels she has successfully written with intent and a message.
Social media impacts a lot of people in this day-and-age. It’s even more important in the music industry to market new material. Missy Alcazar has a supportive community on Twitch, in-turn becoming a positive reason for stopping her from quitting songwriting. “If I didn’t meet this incredible Twitch community, I don’t think I would have continued releasing music.”
Missy Alcazar wants listeners’ to be lifted up when listening to her music. She notes, “I want my music to feel like an old familiar friend that comforts you and holds your hand during trying times. To put it simply, I want my music to make you smile.” She finds it hard trying to describe her music because she doesn’t feel like she sounds like anyone else. “If I had to, I would say my music sounds like a flipina american dueling pianist that decided to mish mash everything I learned from the 700 songs and multiple genres I had to perform on the regular.”
When Missy Alcazar isn’t writing or recording, she loves to write morning pages in her journal. She spends a lot of time with her family, traveling, learning new skills, reading, and graphic design; spending a lot of time researching how to monetize her passions. “ It’s how I love to live my life figuring out how to make a living out of what I love to do,” she says.
Closing out the interview noting a musical highlight, Missy Alcazar notes, “Meeting the most supportive, generous, inspiring and hilarious community on Twitch that single handedly helped my music reach over 90k plays on Spotify within 6 months and gifted me a Nord Stage 3 for my birthday.”
Words by Danielle Holian