'This Is Me' Takes An Oscar Bow

At the end of 2020, Tei Shi was far from her L.A. home, in a dark London basement, trying to do something she hadn’t done in months: write a song.

She had spent the previous half-year of pandemic lockdown coming to a slow realization that she needed to regain control of her career. For the second time, the Canadian-Colombian singer was in a label deal that wasn’t working, with a team she didn’t feel supported by. The loss of autonomy was stifling her creative voice. “I felt like I stopped being able to hear myself,” she says.