Bio:
Francesca de Valence is an Australian artist, award-winning songwriter, speaker, and founder of the global creative tech community, I Heart Songwriting Club. 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.
Francesca has supported artists including Jimmy Webb, Belinda Carlisle and Deacon Blue and her music can be heard on national radio around Australia, France and Ireland. When she’s not on the road running workshops, making music and speaking, Francesca can be found in her hometown of Brisbane or her creative hub in Paris – eating baguettes and writing songs.
A prolific composer with a huge catalogue of independent releases over the past 12 years, Francesca has penned the music for her first musical “Beware of Boys” co-written and co-produced at the Anywhere Theatre Festival (2018), and her latest creation “Songs de Paris” is an ongoing musical experiment of her relationship with Paris – presented live in both Australia and Paris.
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.
Pursued by an overwhelming desire to nurture creative expression and foster a deep sense of belonging in all individuals, Francesca founded the global digital phenomenon I Heart Songwriting Club in 2014, a global online community for songwriters to develop their creative practice through structured 1-hour weekly challenges over 10-weeks. Through this social enterprise, Francesca has been the spiritual and creative midwife for over 8000 new songs from 16 countries around the world and the club has helped develop over 700 artists. Two of these artists, Mama Kin Spender, have been nominated for a 2018 ARIA Award (Australian Recording Industry Award) for their album Golden Magnetic, written as part of I Heart Songwriting Club.
Francesca writes a regular column for Songwriting Magazine UK, has a fortnightly ABC Radio songwriting segment, is a speaker in areas of songwriting and creative and personal development (Folk Alliance International, Rio Music Market, BIGSOUND, IndieCon) and facilitates songwriting workshops nationally and internationally for songwriters of all levels (APRA AMCOS, IMRO, QUT, WAAPA, QMusic, MusicACT).
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)
