Believe in Tei Shi

The Colombian-Canadian songstress reflects on retreating to Vancouver Island to create her most joyful, kinetic record to date.

By Cam Delisle

Photos by Joaquin Castillo

Published on September 11, 2025

Make believe I make believe sounds like something a child might say while play-acting adulthood, or something an adult might say while trying to forget they’re still acting. For Tei Shi, it’s both—a line pulled from “Best be leaving,” the album’s second track, where she murmurs, “How do I make believe, I make believe? / When you waste so much of my time, I best be leaving.” What started as a throwaway line turned into a kind of thesis—a phrase that not only framed the album’s palette but kept mutating long after the fact.

Born Valerie Teicher Barbosa, Tei Shi spent her formative years between Bogotá and Vancouver, retreating to a quiet pocket outside of Nanaimo to sculpt her fourth—and perhaps most crystalline—album to date. “It was really different going back to Vancouver to make an album… I had never really found a place or a group of people there that I was comfortable working with until this opportunity came up,” she says—referring to a rare confluence of trust and timing: a tightly focused collaboration with producers Tommy English and Noah Beresin, where the usual noise of the industry receded and the architecture of the record could emerge with intention.

The impulse to create was there from the outset. This wasn’t about chasing muses or gathering scraps—something that Barbosa admits to having done in the past—it was about walking into the retreat with intention and walking out with the skeleton of a record. “I had to create somewhat of a business plan for this project,” she begins—outlining the logistics behind the vision, including a B.C. grant that helped anchor the project in both place and creative intent. “I applied for an eight song project… and it ended up being ten, but really, I just wanted it to be focused.” That focus resulted in a record defined not by excess, but by precision—a testament to how restraint can open new spaces.

That aforementioned grant’s guidelines pushed Barbosa to work primarily with B.C.-based collaborators—a constraint that ended up deepening her connection to a place she’d once called home, and allowing the album to mirror the textures of the surroundings in which it was conceptualized. “It was a bit of work in the beginning, finding a network of the right people to do this in a place where I have virtually no musical network really… but in that sense, the grant really fulfilled its purpose, and I know that I will continue to work with these people.” While many Canadian artists often bypass homegrown collaboration in favour of the American market, her approach feels both intentional and subversive—reinvesting in her roots while encouraging a model of artistry grounded in locality.

Nowhere is that sense of return more tangible than on the album’s final track, “Nanaimo.” Named after the quiet coastal town where the record took shape, the song plays like a soft exhale—a moment of clarity that reframes distance, both emotional and physical, as necessary for growth. “Had to come here to go there,” she sings, her voice hovering over weightless acoustic production, as if acknowledging that the journey inward couldn’t begin until she’d stepped outside of everything familiar.

Shaking loose the gauze of her earlier melancholy, Make believe I make believe pirouettes into something lighter—ecstatic, even. The album dances at the edge of euphoria, trading whispered elegies for glitter-drenched transmissions from some ethereal dancefloor where heartbreak learns to levitate, Barbosa calls it “Canadianatón.”

On tracks like “Montón” and “Don’t cry,” she tries on the mask of an experimental pop trobadour, her voice lacquered in reverb and feeling. “I think it was just the result of where I am in my life, I’ve never been so self-assured and focused going into an album,” she admits. “My last record, Valerie, came with several years of built-up sadness, anger, rage, and all of these things that I’d been carrying… Once it came out, I finally felt ready to let it all go. I was really able to just lean into things that invigorate me, like dance and movement.”

When I ask Tei Shi what she wishes more interviewers would ask her, she doesn’t hesitate: the future. Not the standard “What’s next?” but what really lies ahead—five years down the line, ten. “You’re so focused on the project you’re currently promoting that no one ever asks about what comes after,” she says. For an artist like Barbosa, whose mind naturally leans forward, that absence can feel stifling. Make believe I make believe might’ve originated in the calm of that Vancouver Island retreat, but it doesn’t end there—it reaches beyond it, into imagined versions of what a career, a sound, and a self can become. It’s a blueprint for how to make permanence out of the temporary.