SOUTH LANCASTER  —Local songstress Kirosha Sidelca’s latest music video premiered on YouTube on Jan. 1. 

The video premiere for Kirosha – her stage name – is for “Grace,” a song that appeared on her 2011 album Journey. Directed by Camy Bruny, the music video was shot in Los Angeles right before the pandemic hit. 

“We flew out there the first week of March and a few days after we came back the world shut down,” said Kirosha. “We got it in just in time, so that was pretty cool. I just decided not to release it as of yet. I had done a few other videos a couple months prior and I wasn’t sure where I was going with the music thing now that the world had shut down, so I just waited to see how things would pan out.”

A lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, the lyrics to Kirosha’s songs are largely religious. For instance, the lyrics for Grace start out with: “Woke up this morning/I knelt down to pray/First time in forever, I had nothing to say,” and eventually move on to, “How did I get here/how far did I stray/and is there a chance you can find me someday?”

While the 36-year-old’s lyrics are religious in nature, the musical accompaniment to her music – like Grace – has a pop/rock flair, making an appropriate categorization for her musical genre “contemporary Christian.”

Kirosha said that the lyrics for Grace and the other songs on Journey were a foreshadowing of a rough patch in her life, brought on by negative interpersonal relations. 

“It’s funny because most of the songs on that album, my situations happened afterwards, so it’s like I wrote the songs before I needed it,” she said. “So, that song [Grace] God just kind of gave it to me, I wasn’t going through anything specific. It was one of those just wake up in my sleep and it just came to me.”

When she’s not writing her own music or raising her three children, Kirosha teaches songwriting and coaches young aspiring singers on how to become recording artists. On Jan. 17, Kirosha is offering a “Singer to Songwriter Roadmap” course, a group class where she teaches singers how to write and record their own music. At the end of the course, each student is introduced to one of Kirosha’s producers who records a track for them. 

“I also teach them about studio etiquette, copywriting, networking, promotions, how to set up a home studio, if they want to record at home,” Kirosha explained. “It’s kind of like a big educational step for anyone who wants to move into recording after just being a singer. It’s something I wish I had when I first recorded my album; I would have done a lot of things differently, saved a lot of money. I wanted to be that guide for people taking that step.”

If you are interested in signing up for Kirosha’s courses or booking her, please go to www.kirosha.com.