Bio:
Francesca de Valence is a multi-award-winning songwriter, founder of I Heart Songwriting Club, and co-founder of Whitsundays Songwriter Festival. A renowned international speaker and educator across the songwriting scene, Francesca’s passion for supporting songwriters has seen her become an uplifting, enlightening, and empowering force for songwriters worldwide through her I Heart Songwriting Club.
Based in Brisbane, Francesca has been published by Songwriting Magazine UK and has facilitated songwriting workshops worldwide with APRA AMCOS, Irish Music Rights Organisation, and Folk Alliance International. Through her visionary work as founder of the online songwriting club – I Heart Songwriting Club – Francesca is revolutionising the songwriting space, helping birth 30,000 songs and changing the lives of thousands of songwriters worldwide.
With a heroic catalogue of over 700 songs, including her impressive streak of writing a song a week for the past 10 years, Francesca music has been recorded and performed by artists including Vika & Linda and Wendy Matthews. As a music industry mentor, she guides artists tour nationally, grow audiences and build sustainable careers, and she hosts the inspiring songwriting podcast, “The Magic of Songwriting”.
Francesca is a leading Australian educator holding a Masters in Music Pedagogy, Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Education. With over 20 years experience teaching at esteemed music schools, including the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, Griffith University, Francesca also develops creative development curriculum and educational programs for schools, music festivals, LGA creative development programs and more.
As a songwriter, she has been acknowledged by the Los Angeles Music Awards with an International Songwriter of the Year Award and also holds an Australian Songwriting Award. She has supported artists including Jimmy Webb, Belinda Carlisle and Deacon Blue and she has performed at iconic global music venues including The Bitter End (NYC), The Viper Room (LA) and The Ruby Sessions (Dublin), at festivals including Folk Alliance International New Orleans (NOLA), MOFO (Hobart) and Brisbane Festival (Brisbane), and has even performed a concert to a French audience entirely in French language.
An ‘uplifting, enlightening, and empowering’ force in the global music industry, Francesca de Valence is a musician with a mission to be living her wildest creative dreams and inspiring others around her to do the same.
The Back Story:
The image of a glasses-wearing 10-year-old Francesca performing a Bach violin sonata for her whole school seems odd against her memory of not having enough money for butter on her vegemite sandwiches. Her parents had spent their bread not on butter but on a formalised, even dogmatic music education. Perhaps her immigrant parents’ approach to child rearing is not surprising given a not-so- distant relative had penned the national anthem for their home country Mauritius. Always curious, Francesca insisted and succeeded in applying for a music scholarship at a high school on the other side of the highway where the parents had shiny cars and the school lawn was always green, even in the harshest Brisbane summer.
But just as she was taking the early steps towards her dream of a magnificent life, Francesca was in a car accident on the way to her 16th birthday party, which left her homebound for three months. She spent these months impressing her first boyfriend by transcribing jazz improvisations and learning to play her parents’ entire CD collection on piano. Her singer-songwriter apprenticeship started out at a fancy-schmancy city piano bar performing the music of her idols Stevie, Paul, Billy and Carole where her mum patiently waited in the corner ‘til eleven o’clock to drive her home. Francesca spent the next 10 years travelling the world playing in hotel lobbies ritzier than the Grand Budapest Hotel and sharing stadium stages with one-named acts. Over the years, there were many failed attempts to escape her dream of being an original artist, but one gig changed it all. Singing back-up for Michael Bublé inspired her to tell her own story. She handed him a demo of originals and for good measure autographed it: “Good luck with your future career, Love Fran xo” and didn’t look back.
“She’s not just a positive presence in the industry, but a creative juggernaut to keep an eye on…this is just the beginning of Francesca de Valence’s ascent to the Australian pop throne” (Music is my Muse)
“The gifts offered up to the world by Francesca are a kind of soul-honey” (Aphra Magazine)
“Australia’s answer to Carole King” (Star Mail)
“There are some gorgeous echoes of the lady at the piano, pop/folk goddesses of the ’70s, but there’s nothing recycled in her lyrics or in her approach to songwriting” (Warp Magazine)
