Kiesza has packed a lot into her 22 years. She's been a navy codebreaker, a national beauty pageant contestant and a tall ship sailor.But these days, writing and performing music is the Calgary native's main passion. It's been only four years since Kiesza (pronounced Kye-za) wrote her first song on her mother's old guitar. "I knew that my mom had a guitar in storage in the house," she says. "My parents got divorced when I was 18 and I had a lot of emotions going on and I went searching for it. When I found it and started playing it, I wrote a song that first day." Kiesza was so excited about writing her first tune she ran across to a neighbour's house and played it for them.As luck would have it, they were in the middle of a dinner party and one of the guests just happened to be CKUA Folk Routes host Tom Coxworth. "He really liked it and asked me if I wanted to play it during a live broadcast of his radio show. It was at the Ironwood in front of a live audience and I got a really good response. I definitely got a buzz and I felt that musician's high. I was addicted from then on." Kiesza was actuallly bitten by the music bug when she was 16-years-old and sailing around Vancouver Island on tall ships as part of the youth-oriented Sail and Lifetime Training Society (SALTS) program. She says she was inspired after hearing a crew member sing Mr. Bojangles during a rough night on choppy waters. "Pots and pans kept falling off their hooks and nobody could sleep," she recalls. "So the boatswain came in and started playing the guitar and I just remember everyone just calmed down and I could see people falling asleep when he was singing. It was amazing. I just remember thinking, 'I want to be able to do that.' " But before Kiesza turned her attention towards a music career, she decided to take a crack at the Canadian navy. "I just signed up one day," she says. "Something intrigued me about going to boot camp." Midway through her three-year naval stint, Kiesza competed in a Miss Universe Canada competition. "It was funny," she says. "I was this navy girl and then I'd run home and have to exercise and learn all these beauty pageant things." Kiesza's experience in the military was part of the reason she decided to give away copies of her self-titled debut album to Canadian troops stationed in Afghanistan this past December. More than 4,500 CDs were sent and she says the response has been overwhelming. "I heard a lot of stories about the situation out there and it was really an eye opener," explains Kiesza, who is recording a tribute song for fallen soldiers. "They have so much pride being there, but yet there is so much danger ... I was really fortunate to have the opportunity to share my music with them." Kiesza has been compared to Sarah McLachlan, but describes her music as orchestral pop-folk with a dash of funk."I started out with a very classic singer-songwriter sound," says Kiesza, who recently won a scholarship to attend Berklee College of Music in Boston. "But as I started to get more into the music scene I started hanging out with other musicians and got into more rhythmic feels and groove, orchestration and things like that. I love variety."