Doing Karaoke and Talking Fowl With Duendita

Bar karaoke can be a lark for the inebriated weekender, but Candace Camacho isn’t fucking around. It’s a scooch shy of midnight on a Friday and she’s perched at the end of a booth, mic in hand, belting out Jessica Simpson’s “With You” in the throaty, luxurious voice that’s become her signature as Duendita. Everyone at Chino Grande, the cozy Brooklyn bar where her friend Ben is the KJ, is going bananas for it, whooping half-drunk or full-drunk or just drunk on vibes. Sitting beside Camacho are four of her friends and her sister, Vanessa, all of whom, as it happens, have professional-grade voices—the kinds you might describe as “dulcet tones,” all pitch-perfect melisma and easy glissando. I consider canceling the song I put in (“Rude Boy”) after witnessing Vanessa and her friend Ava do the Pistol Annies’ “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On,” an a cappella song that nearly silences the whole rowdy joint. Instead, I follow through and try to distract from my vocal mediocrity by mimicking Rihanna’s signature gun-finger choreography. 

Upon reflection, I should have known that Camacho’s whole world, even off the clock, is suffused with good-ass musicians. In Duendita, the project that grew out of her senior thesis at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, she collaborates with a multinational collective of instrumentalists, recording across the world but most frequently in Berlin, where she lives part time, and in her hometown of New York. But she will work anywhere: This past spring, during an artist’s residency centered around climate change and the Puerto Rican diaspora, the jazz- and R&B-informed experimentalist even recorded underwater. Though she often sings about emotional and sociopolitical specifics, her lyrics are sometimes overtaken by the aura of the melody. Her music carries an underlying sense of the sacred, its minimalism grounding it in both melancholy and hope. Her creativity is a thread within the natural world’s fabric.