‘Older, wiser’ Kurt Calleja preps for Eurovision adventure

"I pictured my music career as a girl I wanted to go out with," Kurt Calleja tells me as he describes the genesis of his Malta Song For Europe-winning ditty, This is the Night.

The quirky description is however more endearing than strange, as Kurt - who will be representing Malta in Baku, Azerbaijan during the Eurovision Song Contest in May - is refreshingly frank about his passion for music, and his desire to succeed.

The 22-year-old singer began his musical journey under the tutelage of Brian Cefai, under whom he underwent four years of classical vocal training. In the midst of his training, he took a gamble and travelled to London, where he spent a year and  performed in clubs such as Tiger and Tiger and The Host.

Now training under Joshua Alamu, the singer has established himself as a household name. Indeed, following a brief stint as a background singer for local television, Kurt plunged into what is - for better or for worse - Malta's most prominent musical showcase - the Eurovision Song Contest.

His first experience of the annual appointment with glitter, kitsch and rousing synth ballads came in 2010, when he performed a duet with Priscilla Psaila with the song Waterfall - which however did not qualify beyond the semi-finals in the Malta Euro Song Contest.

But it was Over and Over, the ballad with which Kurt participated in the contest last year, that propelled him to national attention and while it lost to Glen Vella's One Life, it still managed to get voted into third place.

The song proved to be a stepping stone, securing a number of consistent local gigs for the singer.

"Thanks to these experiences I became more confident and more focused on what I want, a career in the music business," Kurt says, adding that a number of things are different this year around.

"For one, I am a year older, a year wiser and year more experienced in my art; but also during this year my band and I managed to put together a huge team that helped us with having a good image, performance, stamina and a positive mental attitude.

"Also, Over and Over is a pop ballad which went down well with the listeners but with This is the Night we gave a show which I am glad was very much appreciated by the audience," the singer says, referring to the fact that This is the Night is a far more upbeat tune - bolstered by a monosyllabic chorus that aims to get people jumping.

In fact, it is while recounting the song's writing process that Kurt reveals his quirky 'girl as song' metaphor.

"As I was attempting to write lyrics I thought about how people reacted to the lyrics of Over and Over. I asked myself: 'what was so special about them?' The answer is that I used a personal past experience to write it. So I thought - 'OK! What am I going to do to have the same effect on this song? What is the thing I want most?' - a long list came to mind but it got narrowed down to two: a music career and love (something like what you would see in movies like The Notebook).

"So I gave my music career the shape of a love interest, started jotting down whatever lyrics came to mind with this metaphor in mind, and later started arranging them to fit the melody."

But alas, this complex metaphor wasn't enough to sustain an entire song, and what eventually formed part of the chorus occurred partly by accident.

"When I ran out of lyrics, I went: 'eq, eq, eq, eq'..." Kurt confesses while talking about the song which helped him win the Malta Song for Europe contest on February 4.

And whatever the outcome of Kurt's Eurovision travails, the singer is already adopting a 'live and let live' approach to his journey to Azerbaijan in May.

"We are not expecting anything and we will not be surprised by anything. We are very happy to have been entrusted with this opportunity to represent our country in a festival which is so dear to the Maltese public and so we are and will be doing our utmost to give a performance which will make the Eurovision audience jump, dance and hopefully do our moves with us. If our audience enjoys our performance we are winners in our hearts," Kurt says.

As is perhaps expected in today's world of instant online mockery, Kurt's recent visit to Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi was instantly seized upon by Facebook satire page Satiristan. Somewhat blackly, the doctored photo depicted the singer handing a CD of the recently-deceased Whitney Houston to the PM, under a caption that reads: 'Ir-rigal ta' Kurt lill-Prim Ministru ma jidhirx li kien idea tajba hafna' ('Kurt's idea of a gift for our Prime Minister wasn't a very good one').

Kurt, however, appears to take this in his stride.

"What's life without a bit of humour?" he says. 

The semi-finals of this year's Eurovision Song Contest will take place on May 22 and 24, and the final will take place on May 26.