Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Melina Coolen.
Melina Coolen is a Canadian musician, songwriter, producer and audio engineer. Her retropop influence is undeniable in her carefully self-produced sound and sophisticated songwriting style. After years of formal classical training and receiving the RCM Silver Medal in piano, she pursued her love for pop and jazz songwriting in college and university. Paying homage to the Brill Building greats, Melina researched production and recording techniques of the past while studying at Toronto Metropolitan University. There, she released her debut EP, All of My Life, in 2017 in conjunction with her master’s thesis on analog and digital recording hybrids.
Part of a new instrumental series, Melina is sharing the poignant and heartfelt piece “Behind Every Cloud.” Stream + share now.
I composed this piece about eight winters ago shortly after my grandfather passed away. I’m a spiritual person, and I could sense the response in nature and his presence. For about a week or two after his passing, I remember the sun being extra vivid in the sky. Once I looked out my window on a stormy day and the clouds were dark but the sun was shining brightly behind them. It was very striking and inspired “Behind Every Cloud.”
“If music is the food of love, Melina Coolen makes musical comfort food, with uplifting and hopeful lyrics wrapped in a blanket of 1960s orchestral pop goodness and 1970s-style songcraft.” – Stephen Cooke, The Chronicle Herald
I’ve always been a very visual musician. I grew up in a scenic part of Nova Scotia and always felt a deep connection to nature. I would look at the trees and compose or listen to music and watch the colourful sky over the ocean. I even had a phase as a child of videotaping every single sunset that I could on my old cassette video recorder because every sunset is different and I wanted to capture them all! The intense and passionate connection to visual beauty and music is still a part of my creative process. That all being said, one of my favourite songs to blast at the sunset used to be James Last’s Biscaya. You just need to be by the ocean at sunset to really get this piece, I think: The longing of the waves played by the accordion, the sadness in the dramatic colours sung by the chorus and just the stunning beauty of nature. I feel Behind Every Cloud resonates with this, too, in that I composed it with similar feeling ingredients, just a different nature scene and instrument combination. Biscaya was a piece my grandfather appreciated, so it also feels fitting to choose it, given Behind Every Cloud’s origins.
I love a variety of herbal teas, but my favourite in the evenings is plain chamomile. I’ve tried different brands of it in the past and they were barely tolerable. So if I’m going to drink it, it has to be this random Polish brand I found in the grocery stores. Not only does it taste good, I find it relaxing too.
This is a painting of mine which was inspired by one of my grandfather’s many photos of the sunset where I grew up, and it was also inspired by the Biscaya album cover.
Tea + Me 