Artist profile: The Autumn Portrait

text: Natasha de Puyjalon & Kateryna Topol | photography: Mike Ford

The glamorous life of a performing artist is wrapped up in flashy hotels, champagne and sold out shows. Or is it?

During this last year of interviews we’ve noticed that most up-and-coming artist spend their nights working some sorry-ass guest experience jobs while trying to make their dreams happen. They also, probably, most likely, have very little idea about what it is they need to do in order to get noticed. More on that later. Meanwhile, keep in mind that YouTube alone will probably not make you famous.

This past December we had a chance to meet a few of Toronto’s indie artists while visiting Coalition’s Artist Entrepreneurship class. One of the artists we spent time with was a self-taught singer/songwriter Freddie Mojallal, aka The Autumn Portrait; a September child who crafts songs descriptive of his life and love.

Like many other singer/songwriter types, he moved to the big city to pursue his destiny after experiencing a bad breakup. On the wings of that heartbreak and charged with emotion, The Autumn Portrait rooted in Toronto where he still hopes to create a sustainable career as a musician. Not an original story per se, but a respectable starting point for many famous artists.

Mojallal’s relationship with music began somewhere around the 8th grade, during an unsuccessful guitar lesson. Although his official musical education was short-lived the learning never stopped.  With 15 years of self-inflicted guitar education came the debut indie rock album, The Design is Over in 2010. But after all of that loving and losing, the West coast native had a change of heart and wrote the memoir-based acoustic folk album, Tired Love. This album is composed of raw, nostalgic sounds that were all written, recorded and produced entirely by the artist, in his home studio.

Live shows are his strong point and have already taken him through small venues across Canada over the last few years. While some artists hope to produce platinum albums, this guy dreams of playing live in the US alongside Glen Hansard, Bon Iver and the like, eventually taking the show on the road to steal the little trembling hearts of European girls.

In the meanwhile he is working as a bartender and a booking manager for other bands while co-producing his next video for the self-titled track “Tired Love”.

So there you have it, a cute boy with a guitar in a black blazer playing songs about life and love on an open stage, or perhaps during a Skype session, if you’re lucky like that.