Q&A: KATHLEEN Finds Creative Light Even in Isolation
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO MEND WORLDS? — Kathleen spends much of her time finding out how. She spent her childhood growing up in the abundant nature of the Rocky Mountains and writing songs in relative creative isolation since she was seven years old. Since then, she’s studied the meticulous world of poetry in college and moved to Los Angeles before she signed with Warner Records.
On her early EPs, Kathleen I and Kathleen II, she honed her unique artistic voice. Negotiating her literary, poetic impulses and structures from her studies with the sparseness that the pop form demands, collaborators such as Dan Nigro helped her adjust to writing in LA. Since, she’s continued to grow her musical and artistic sensibilities working with new collaborators, including her neighbor during quarantine, producer Tim Anderson.
In the city, nature isn’t as readily accessible, but especially through the COVID-19 quarantine Kathleen turned back toward that inherent connection, using the sunrise and sunset to anchor lonely days working on much of the new music she’s recently released, including “Fever Dream” and “How Long Will This Last.”
Her recent singles and upcoming releases are building towards a larger body of work melding different periods in her life. Some songs written after a breakup in 2018 illustrate the pain and feelings of separation that follow an unbalanced relationship. Others grapple with how to live and find meaning in a world that is nearly unrecognizable. Despite the many years that have elapsed between the writing of these different songs, Kathleen finds fascinating parallels between her emotional worlds in each period that make these songs a fascinating collection.
Read below to learn more about Kathleen’s relationship with songwriting and poetry, what writing in isolation was like, and what we can expect next from the singer-songwriter.
LUNA: The first thing I noticed in my research is that you grew up in the Rocky Mountains, and I actually did too. I feel like there aren’t a ton of people in the entertainment world that are from there, so how do you think growing up in that environment informed you artistically?
KATHLEEN: For me, there just wasn't any art in the town. I mean, there's definitely art, but it wasn't a community. There wasn't any sort of culture that I felt growing up that way. It was, you know, just enormously beautiful and scenic. And there's all this culture around the outdoors and celebrating and being outside and all that, but I felt really isolated in my pursuit of the art. So it became a pretty solitary thing for the most part. I've gone through a lot of waves of how overwhelmingly beautiful it can be to be surrounded by so many creatives [in LA], but then [it gets] quickly overwhelming. And feeling, on good days … completely electrified and on bad days, totally claustrophobic.
LUNA: I would guess growing up with that outdoors-y culture led to your passion about environmentalism and connecting that with your career. How do you think that music and environmentalism go hand in hand? What should artists be doing to aid causes like climate change, in your view?
KATHLEEN: I was lucky to be raised in a place where the natural world is really untouched, so I didn't have to travel somewhere to “escape into nature,” you know. There’s sort of like a second language with it… Do you ever go hiking and you know exactly, like a second sense, how to detect the fall line? And you just know how that mountain works, and [can navigate] that nonverbally, almost. It's like this muscle. Coming into cities or places where that might not be prevalent, it’s strange to be asked, “Oh, how does nature play a role in your life?” I don't know how to table it. You know? It's just there.
But to answer the second part of your question, I think for me, I struggle with the balance between being too overt and on the nose and even … in the worst sense, preachy, with inserting awareness in or discussing it. I think for me, it also comes out naturally because a lot of the metaphors and things that I have in my head are nature-based and [of] the memories I have. It just comes out naturally in lyrics and shapes and melodies. But in terms of how artists and musicians can aid causes like climate change? I mean, the obvious answer is that we have a stage. And we should, you know, provide a place for organizers or ourselves to speak to large audiences. I try my best to make the art in a way that's either sustainable or thinking of it in a sustainable way where there's less waste involved. It's kind of baked into the art. It's really impossible to have a perfect, perfect zero carbon in every way. But just trying to whenever there's a decision that’s less wasteful or more supportive, maybe [of] an organizer or an advocate or a member of an Indigenous community could speak on this or could take this art.
LUNA: You mention in your bio that you studied poetry in college, and songwriting and poetry are often so intimately connected. But there's also a certain amount of translation that happens between the two. Did studying an art form approximate to songwriting ever hamper your love of the craft or impact it in a negative way?
KATHLEEN: I think it's always a little bit of both, in whatever realm. It's an intimate relationship so there's going to be fights that you have within the art forms. I think in the negative, where it hampered me, was when I was trying to shove a poem into a song. And when I just graduated and I moved here [LA] right after, there were these two distinct worlds that were pretty antagonistic to each other, honestly. The strict pop world, which is focused on… in the most stereotypical way, simple melodies, repeated things over and over really fast. So that produces a lot of mediocre words and lyrics. There are great writers who do it well, and it's nothing short of excellent, but I think it can lend itself to a lot of mediocrity. And in poetry, it’s so focused on the opposite. You're not a great poet until you're really old and have been doing the craft for a really long time. It's about negative space as much as it is about the words themselves. Each word holds intention and space. That's just one philosophy, but just those two basic ones, when I was trying to take that much emphasis on the words themselves and that much craft into it and shove it into a song, it was like too many sauces and I lost the main dish completely. So I'm figuring out how to retain that poetic integrity and that love of exploring literature but also give space for the music itself.
LUNA: Getting into some of your recent releases, your songs “How Will This Last” and “Fever Dream” both center around a sense of drudgery and an immense sadness that came from the COVID lockdown period. How did you decide to release both of these songs? Did they come from different sources of inspiration, or were they more different ways of articulating similar feelings?
KATHLEEN: I think “How Long Will This Last” was written first. I wrote that during hardcore lockdown. Nobody's leaving unless they need groceries. I was living alone and I had this lovely upright piano in my apartment that was my best friend even more than it normally is. I was just writing and then I would go on these walks and think about how it’s so beautiful, how calm it was.
I was living in Echo Park, and it's aptly named Echo Park — one car drives fast and the whole sonic landscape is taken over by that. When that was gone, it was just beautiful bird sounds. I was really trying to make a sunrise and a sunset hike because when it was that kind of confinement, watching the sun come up and then watching it go down was the only way I could stay sane. It was really strange. And if I missed it, my whole day was fucked. But then after the sunset went down, you go back in and you're like, “Well, it's all a loss,” like, “Where do I put this? How do I share this with anyone?” It's questioning that sort of aspect of solitude.
Everything was written originally with my neighbor in that apartment I was living in, Tim Anderson. And he’s also happened to be a really kickass producer. Because we were living in the same space, we had a unique shared perspective on the frustrations that were coming from the outside world around what we were in and how confusing that was and how strange and angry it made us. All these more eruptive emotions. So I came in and worked on that with a few other producers. So when it came time to release them, it felt like they were twins, you know, like dark sisters or something like that same space but different emotional spectrum.
LUNA: Another song you’re releasing soon is called “Beautiful Waters.” I loved the lyric “Loneliness feels like dyeing your hair so many times that the hair falls out.” And it struck me immediately as a familiar feeling. How did this line kind of come about?
KATHLEEN: I think I was just at a coffee shop writing a poem, very loosely, stream of consciousness, trying to explain how I was feeling in as many images as possible. I didn't set out to say a bunch of images … I was just trying to describe it. “What the fuck am I feeling right now?” So all those lines came out in a stream. And then later I was in a session with that guitar line and I ran into the booth and just fell on the first thing that was on my computer, opened it, and it happened to be that poem. So just, like, shit it out really fast.
LUNA: For your song “Phantom Love,” you used AI technology to interpret your performance of the song to create the music video. What led you to use the technique? There's an interesting conversation around the possible dangers of how much technology we mix with art and where those kinds of lines get drawn. How do you feel about that worry?
KATHLEEN: It’s a crazy time to be alive. In terms of choosing how to use it, I was working with my friend Peter [Curet], who did the processing and the digital art on the visual and the single cover. We were talking about a range of ideas of different digital art and different techniques and different software that we could use, but it just so happened when we were talking about making this video that [AI] technology had become available to the public like two days before. So he was like, “Man, we should use this. We should just experiment on it.” And I was like, “Hell yeah.”
In terms of the dangers and darkness of it, I can't see into the future, but I do believe that when we project really dark futures about technologies, it's because of how we see ourselves as humans and our own virtues. I think Her, the movie, is a really interesting example of how technology can be really intelligent, and we lose control of it but not in a negative way. But I don't know what will happen. Basically, AI, it's just a mirror of everything that we've put into the internet. So the way that those things will be used is dependent on the intentions of the people using it and making sure that we put good in and not take shortcuts and not make short-sided decisions that are good for profit right away. Or lazy decisions that will make us happier. We have to be really forward-thinking and think into the long-term with how we use it. So with art, I don't know. I wanted to make something beautiful that was also a little uncanny and grotesque but see what would happen with it. Then get to know it a little bit, and hopefully, moving forward, have a better grip of how to be more intentional with it when it inevitably does take larger spaces in their lives.
LUNA: It seems like there are a lot of fingerprints of the lockdown period on a lot of this music. What space were you in when you were creating these new songs, both mentally and physically?
KATHLEEN: “Phantom Love” is about… When did I write that? Beginning of 2018, around March. So it's four years old. “Beautiful Waters” was written around then, as well as a couple that are more breakup-focused. And then there are new ones that were written two years later inside of lockdown. So it's kind of a range. And they took a long time to come together because, you know, I wasn't able to finish the songs with producers. I wasn't able to do all these things. It was kind of a backup, so there's not a clean inspirational trail. But it's interesting how the themes do, in many ways, repeat themselves. In terms of that breakup, I felt very much in confinement and really limited in so many ways. So yeah, it's kind of funny — lockdown time came around and I was like, “I've been here before.” Everybody else was [t]here with me now. I thought I was very codependent, and then there were a lot of codependencies that were happening with lockdown. I became really tight with a lot of my neighbors. And it turns out we're really, really different, but we needed each other. So I guess that is a conclusion I can draw with those two. Sort of a sense of confinement and isolation and just feeling like you need to bust out. And then other times being so exhausted by it that you can't even pick your head up.
LUNA: On your first EP, you worked with the producer Dan Nigro, who's really had a moment lately and did some background vocals on tracks he worked on for Olivia Rodrigo and Maisie Peters. Now, you’re working with a varied set of new collaborators such as Tim Anderson and Tim Friesen. What did you learn musically and artistically from working with so many types of creatives in so many different capacities?
KATHLEEN: I was really lucky to meet Dan basically right when I moved here. He's been a big mentor and friend for a long time. And to see him have so much success, with Conan [Gray] and Olivia [Rodrigo], like all these different projects he's been working on for so long… They're really good. And they're really consistent. And he taught me a lot about some things I don't necessarily agree with for my art, and we talked about that. I had my first session with him in LA. It was for the song “Asking the Aspens” and a couple others. I think I was doing something, and he suggested that I sing like a melody and I kind of looked at him in a way that was like, “No, you're not invited to my writing space.” And he was just like, “You know, you can put something that didn't come from your brain in the song.” He was a really impactful and meaningful mentor for me breaking out of my isolation, poetry, must-be-a-certain-way brain.
STINT is really excellent at sound design and has a totally interesting head on his shoulders.Tim Anderson also has an ambient side. So he goes to a lot of different spaces and energies that are those sounds. I love working with different collaborators that I can just learn from constantly.
LUNA: My last question is kind of the one that everybody asks at the end, which is, as you release new music, with “Beautiful Waters” coming out soon, what can we expect from you in the future?
KATHLEEN: Just a lot with music and a lot of visuals. I love to make the visuals and be a part of it as much as the music. I just look forward to a lot more bizarre and exciting collaborations. I’m stoked to play shows and see how these sorts of things play out in live settings. Yeah, definitely excited for a larger body of work.
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