There’s a specific kind of creative restlessness that makes an artist go back and take apart their own work. Sheila Simmenes released her debut album “Love Was Easy” back in 2021 as a songwriter and jazz vocalist, and apparently, that wasn’t the end of the story. Working under her producer alias Eloah Blú, she’s been spending 2024 remixing the whole thing – pulling the songs apart and rebuilding them around rhythms and textures from further afield. “Beautiful – Eloah Blú Remix” is one of those reworkings, and it dropped on May 29th. Simmenes is based between Norway and Brazil, and you can hear both in this track – Nordic cool running underneath Brazilian heat, with trumpet textures and live-feeling percussion threading through the electronic production.
While the song is indeed club-oriented, at heart it’s more of a fusion than generic EDM, with jazz-influenced harmony and Brazilian rhythmic motifs throughout. It’s always more interesting, in my opinion, when someone with a great deal of musical knowledge, like Sheila, does a dance song, because it always has more depth beneath the surface of danceable rhythms and melodic hooks.
The remix project as a whole is worth keeping an eye on. Taking a body of work you wrote as a vocalist and reimagining it through your own production lens is a legitimate artistic choice, and “Beautiful” makes a decent case for why it was worth doing. It’s also a reminder that the dual identity – Sheila Simmenes the songwriter and Eloah Blú the producer – isn’t just a branding exercise. The two sides are actually in conversation here, with the production choices responding to the original material rather than just dressing it up. The jazz instincts are still there underneath the beats, and that’s not something you can fake. If the rest of the remix series holds to the same standard, the full run should be worth revisiting as a body of work.