At some point after Kristina Aglinz settled in Los Angeles, she began working with Jorge Calandrelli, the Grammy-winning arranger and producer, who took on arrangements of her original songs. Calandrelli has since died, and the arrangements he worked on exist as a record of who Aglinz was as a writer at that moment.
Years passed, and she started hearing that material differently. The songs had not changed. She had. “I am a different person right now,” she says.
The decision that followed is the interesting part. Aglinz could have treated the older versions as finished work and released them as they stood, which would have been the simpler path and, given Calandrelli’s stature, an easily marketable one. She chose instead to return to the emotional core of each song and rebuild it from her current perspective.
That process is what the album due in early 2027 actually is: songs written across different stretches of her life, newly arranged and newly recorded, rather than an archive cleaned up for release.
“Heaven Is Shining Bright”, out now on all platforms, is the first result of that approach and her first original single of any kind. Written by Aglinz with lyrics by Anatoly Berlin, it introduces the idea she wants the whole project to carry, a conviction that love, hope and beauty hold up under pressure. “I want to create music that brings hope, light, peace and beauty,” she says. “Even in difficult moments, we are never alone.”
Reworking your own back catalog before anyone has heard the originals is a peculiar position to be in, and it comes with a trade-off. Listeners will never get to compare drafts. What reaches them in 2027 will be the current reading, shaped by a musician whose training spans classical piano performance and whose ear was formed on American jazz, soul and funk.
The upside is coherence. An album built from decades of writing could easily sound like a compilation. Filtering everything through one perspective, recorded in one period, is a reasonable way to prevent that, and the single is the first evidence of how it lands.
The single is streaming everywhere now, with a video sitting alongside the rest of her work on YouTube. Album news will follow at her website.
