Aziza and the Cure

Aziza & the Cure

We are Bradley Rouen and Joelle Britt from Aziza & the Cure. We are a violin/guitar duo, a couple and the creators of our own neo-pop sub-genre that we call Symphonic Soul Pop. Our main focus is maximizing our potential, so we can be the greatest force for good in the global community.

The first step we took in this process was to turn our relationship into the subject of our debut album, Through All Our Fears. We confronted our personal issues within the context of our ultimate goal of goodness. Our latest video, Basta, is based on the most difficult issue we’ve had to deal with: infidelity.

We admit that confronting this particular issue has led to meltdowns, but these meltdowns led us to insights that we otherwise would have missed and provided us with first-hand experience that taught us within our problems lies the lessons we need to learn. We continue to learn as we continue to embrace our mistakes, failures and issues with an unwavering focus on personal growth.  With that said, we’d like to share with you some of the lessons we learned in our own words.

Bradley Rouen

Aziza and the Cure lovers “When Joelle and I addressed my infidelity, it was difficult for me to take responsibility for my actions. I would rationalize it one way or another, so I didn’t have to face my tremendous misconduct.

Humans want to be right; we want to be good. I didn’t want to deal with the mess I made and face how strongly it clashed with everything I considered important in life. I didn’t want to be so wrong, but I wouldn’t trade the process of opening up to my faults and cleaning up the mess I made for anything, because it strengthened our connection and helped me learn how to live.

If it weren’t for the way Joelle challenged me to think about my choices, I wouldn’t have seen my shortcomings, and I wouldn’t have grown so much as an individual. I’m profoundly thankful that these insights didn’t cost us our relationship.”

Joelle Britt

Aziza and the Cure laughing “Some women may move on from relationships in which they were cheated on, but they bring the bricks of that relationship into their next and build the same house. Hearing about situations like the one I was in, I always thought the strong woman would walk out.

I later realized that leaving a relationship doesn’t necessarily make you stronger, especially if you both love each other. It was a powerful lesson for me to learn that there is no generic prescription for every problem, but that each person must find the courage to look beyond their initial pain and what others might think in order to listen to their intuition and use their best judgment.

We all have unique problems and, on top of that, we are socially conditioned to fit a certain mold. I’m still with Brad so we can work on bettering ourselves, breaking out of the mold and creating a better world where problems like this cease to exist.”

Embrace Errors and Welcome Mistakes

This process of embracing errors and developing a growth mindset extends to composition, technique and building your fan base. If no one is coming to your shows, would you give up or would you question what action you can take to draw more people? You might not solve your dilemma immediately, but if you stay with the question, confident the answer will come, you will solve the problem. The same goes for composing. As writing partners, we often disagree, but each disagreement ultimately opens our minds to new possibilities and always makes the music better.

Though this idea of welcoming mistakes is nothing new (with proponents as anachronistic as Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs), its potential importance to musicians has never been so great as there have never been so many opportunities for independent musicians to succeed. If more of us make a concerted effort to focus on growing through our mistakes as opposed to avoiding them, we can continue to grow as writers, players and musicians, build a fan base that is perfect for our band, and push the limits of what music can do for the world.

Aziza and the Cure Brad and Joelle
Aziza & the Cure
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Watch our Basta music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bfied-HEtw