One Writer Lost Her Singing Voice. She Refused to Lose Her Voice.

When one door closes

There's a difference between the life you imagine and the life you suddenly have to navigate. Teresa Louise Hayward knows that line intimately. A serious car accident left her living with a disability. Then she lost the singing voice she'd always used to express herself. For a lot of people, that's the end of the sentence. For her, it was a comma.

She records under the name Iwasnearlythere — and if you sit with that name for a second, it tells you everything. It's the feeling of being on a journey, of having a destination in mind, and of finding out the destination moved. "I was nearly there," she says. "But I am still on my journey."

Here's what she kept when everything else changed: the lyrics. The memories. The experiences worth sharing. "My singing voice might have changed, but I had not lost my ability to write, imagine or create." So she found another way to bring the songs out — using assisted music-generation technology to turn her written work into finished tracks. She's open about it, on purpose. The tool isn't the heart of the music. The story is. "My work begins with me."

That honesty is the whole point. She's not hiding her process or pretending to be something she isn't. She writes the words, picks the subjects, steers the direction. The tech just gets those stories heard.

The trio behind the record

The new work doesn't happen alone. Teresa teamed up with VIMANA — the Croatian duo of composer/pianist/conductor Aleksandar Kačurov and Miroslav Radović.

Kačurov isn't new to this. Three decades across classical, musical theatre, film scoring and contemporary pop. His early compositions were performed at the Zagreb Music Biennale in 2009. He's appeared at the Split Festival and written original musical theatre works — It's Hard to Be a Pensioner, Little Ida's Flowers, The Nightingale, Winter Idyll. He and Radović overcame their own grind to get here: financial difficulty, and the long hustle of finding artists who wanted their music and musicals. Anyone who's shopped original work around knows how heavy that is.

Together, VIMANA moves freely — pop, rock, classical, cinematic soundscapes. For Kačurov, music is a way of connecting people past language and borders. You can hear why he and Teresa clicked.

Champagne and Heartstrings

The collaboration becomes Champagne and Heartstrings, an album arriving in late November. Kačurov and Radović wrote the compositions; Teresa wrote the lyrics, built around her sensibility.

What makes it worth your ear is the refusal to pick a lane. "The Strongest Heart" is a British pop song about resilience, love and inner strength — the single leading the whole thing. "Champagne for Me" leans into sophisticated jazz. "Johnny Johnny" throws in a Spanish rumba in the spirit of the Gipsy Kings. There's "It's Christmas Again," dressed in 1940s Old Hollywood glamour, and "What a Night," a New Year's Eve pop celebration.

That range could feel scattered in the wrong hands. Here it's held together by melody and emotion — the shared belief that music shouldn't be boxed into one genre.

What they want you to feel

Teresa's goal is simple and unglamorous in the best way: she wants people to enjoy the music, and to find comfort in it if they need it. Not pity — she's clear about that. Her disability is part of her life, not the whole of who she is. Sometimes success is finishing a song you never thought you could make. Sometimes it's just not giving up.

Kačurov wants listeners who love what he loves — classical, musicals, pop, rock — and are open to the new way of folding those styles together.

What's next

More collabs, together and apart. New artists, hopefully new friends. VIMANA's own next album, Zaboravljene pjesme (Forgotten Songs), lands October 27, with a video for the title single "Ana Karenjina." And Champagne and Heartstrings in late November.

Start with "The Strongest Heart" (watch here). Then follow them: Iwasnearlythere on Spotify, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube; VIMANA/Aleksandar on Spotify, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Her circumstances changed how she makes music. They never touched the stories she needed to tell.