Sedona resident and Dutch native Christel Veraart’s latest album was inspired by one moment during the 2020 pandemic. “The first thing I heard one morning when I woke up, it was a tango,” she says. “That’s when it started. And then I kept going, because I felt nostalgic.” Once that nostalgia took hold, it did not let go. Her latest album is inspired by Argentina, a country she resided in for one year and has traveled to many times. Christel composed the music and wrote the lyrics for her latest release, “Nostalgia – Reflections on Argentina.” This is her eleventh album that also happens to feature a total of 11 songs. Ballet Arizona even choreographed a ballet based on two tracks from it. She describes the album as being very warm.
“Argentina has changed me forever. I was a very young musician. When I went, it was the first time that I was living in a country that was far away from everything that I knew. I was all by myself. I didn’t have anybody to rely on. It made me really strong,” she says. “I love the music that comes from that country and has been with me for my entire career and still is.” The multi-disciplinary artist – she’s a musician, composer, filmmaker and writer – also created a book and film to accompany the music. The book is called “Santa Fe and Esmeralda.” The book, which is unpublished, is about the friendship between Kita, a young Dutch woman, and Lorenzo, the son of a prominent Argentinian family. Although she didn’t originally conceive of the project as including both an album and a book, she says when she had created each project, they all fit together beautifully.
Although she has lived and traveled all over the world, Christel says she feels inspired by Sedona’s natural beauty. She and her husband relocated to Sedona in 2019 to be closer to his parents, who live in Phoenix. “It’s hard not to be inspired. Sedona is such beauty around me, and I’ve always been inspired by landscapes,” she says. She released one album that was inspired by all the stars that you can see in Sedona. Although she typically writes about the place she’s currently in, her latest album was about another time in her life. “It’s a memory. It’s thinking about something that happened so many years ago. It’s just reflecting,” she says. “Living in Sedona does that too, that you reflect on things because you’re surrounded by such beauty.” − Teresa K. Traverse
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