Carmelina Cupo keeps her career on track

By Dan Hilborn
Published April 16, 2005


Carmelina Cupo, the award-winning Burnaby singer who may be better known in Italy than in her own hometown, will be the master of ceremonies when the 15th annual Miss Italia Nel Mondo Canada 2005 pageant is held at the Italian Cultural Centre on April 29.

Cupo, who won the title of Miss Campania in Italy two years ago, will join Italian model and actor Karim Capuano at the affair, which will choose the Canadian representative to the Miss Italia Nel Mondo competition taking place in Italy this summer.

The pageant signals a return to the local stage for the Burnaby native, who is currently looking for a Canadian distributor for her new CD, I-5 Dreams, which was produced at Rear Window Studios last fall.

"Lots of things are happening," said Cupo. "After the CD was produced, I left for Berlin to do shows and through December and January we were working on lots of stuff in Europe."

Cupo credits producer Adam Popowitz from the band Molly's Revenge for giving the 12-song CD its rich, wall-of-sound texture that comes through on both its solid pop rock songs and energetic Italian- language numbers.

"I call it a raw sound," she said. "We wanted to get down to the basics and not have something that was so finely tuned. And we wanted to be as raw as we could be in the live instruments."

But Cupo also said she's in no real hurry to get signed to a major label.

"We haven't released the album in Canada yet," she said. "We've had some offers but I've declined. I'm looking for the right label. It's important to me that this goes out the right way.

"I'll know when I find the right people," she said. "This is my album and I've put everything into it. This is me, me, me. I guess I'm being a little picky, but I want to make sure it goes out the right way."

Cupo's career may be taking its time to develop but the young artist is making sure to build it on a solid foundation.

In 2001, she won the B.C. portion of the Canadian National Songwriting Competition with a piece called Careless Words. Prior to that, she earned honourable mention in the Billboard Magazine songwriting contest.

In her travels across Europe, she's been invited to play at some of the largest music festivals in the world, including one cold night in Warsaw, Poland, when she performed in front of 60,000 fans.

But trying to find the right distributor can be a tough slog for anyone. And it's probably doubly difficult for Cupo, who only has to look at the good fortunes of her brother Antonio Cupo to see what can happen when a media buzz takes hold.

Antonio recently landed a starring role in the top-rated Italian TV show Elisa Di Rivombrosa, was recently featured in a four-page spread in the Italian edition of Vanity Fair magazine in November and has signed a full clothing sponsorship with Giorgio Armani for the spring and summer season.

Carmelina hopes to spend much of this coming summer touring Italy again. But, before she takes off, there is this one last chance to see her on stage during the Miss Italia Nel Mondo Canada 2005 pageant

Tickets to the pageant are $85 apiece and can be obtained from the cultural centre at 604-430-3337 or at Marco Polo L'Eco d'Italia at 604-294-8707.