FMM: I can’t believe it’s been a year since we chatted! I’ve honestly been loving Bloodshot. It’s my favourite so far. I know I say this for every release of yours, but they overtake each other very quickly.
KYARA: Aw, thank you. I’m so glad you like this one. This one probably is one of my personal favourites. I like them [her singles] all on their own but this one I really love.
FMM: I was listening to it in the gym yesterday.
KYARA: *laughs* It is a bit of a gym track. I like to listen to it because I don’t run on the treadmill. I’ll just do a bit of a power walk and it’s got the perfect beat for a steady walk.
FMM: Exactly! So, as I’ve said, it’s been a year since we spoke, what have you been up to?
KYARA: Okay, look, there’s a lot cooking. I’ve got a lot of music that I’m just trying to get all ready to come out. I just need the perfect time to do it. I had a few day job changes this year that changed up my routine. When I released my last two singles, I was working a desk job, so it was a lot easier to find the time in between actual work to get things done with my music stuff, and I was handling all my PR back then. Then I ended up working retail as a day job this year, so it’s not something where I could sit there and get my music stuff done, so I took a little bit of a break.
But yeah, I was sitting on Bloodshot for such a long time. I wrote that song a year ago. It’s been sitting in the vault for a hot minute, and I was sick of it sitting there idle, and I needed to release something soon. I was missing releasing my stuff, so I just dedicated every single second of spare time I had to finishing the song, but it was sitting in demo stages for a while. I’m so happy with how it turned out.
FMM: What’s your relationship to the song now fast forward to a year later?
KYARA: I love it even more now than I did when I first started. The story of how I came up with the song is actually funny. I was getting ready to have a shower and I went to go into the shower and I looked quickly in the bathroom mirror because my eyes were really red from that day. I started laughing because anyone in my life who knows me, knows that I get really sensitive eyes. I have my eye drops in my bag. Maybe it was from my cat, I don’t know. Sometimes I play with my cat and my eyes react and they’ll be the first things to go red.
I’m about to shower and I’m looking at my eyes and I was like, “Hmm. Bloodshot is a good word.” Then, I got into the shower, and I was just playing around with the word, and I started coming up with a melodic line. I started singing it, came up with the words, and I was like, “Ooh. Oh, it’s perfect.” It just came together like that. It’s so funny. As soon as I finished that shower, I sat down in my room and started punching out the song, finished it at my friend’s house and that’s really it. I wrote it really quickly. The production came along pretty quick, but it was a more basic one for quite a while, then I added a few more embellishments.
I gave myself a slight pat on the back when I came up with that melody in the shower so quickly. I thought it was a unique melody, and the production came together so seamlessly. I sat on it for such a long time because initially the production was so busy. I felt like it was too chaotic and I didn’t want to release it while feeling so stimulated when I listened to it. I don’t want other people to think the same. So, I took great care, maybe a little bit too much, but great care trying to balance it all out and make it perfect. That’s when I added that sax in. It was chef’s kiss. I was happy with it. I think it’s one of the songs I’m proudest of, because it took a lot of work to get there.
FMM: I have so many things I want to ask you about, but firstly, I love with your creative process. For your last two songs as well, there’s very short time between you coming up with an idea, and you actually taking action about it.
KYARA: That’s true, actually. I think it always starts with some melodic line. I always think of the melody and maybe a small line for some lyrics for the chorus. I always have my phone somewhere near me so I can quickly record a voice memo. I had it with me in the bathroom, so I had the fan in the bathroom going on. It’s all noisy. It’s just me humming. I’ve got to find that voice memo at some point. I’m the kind of person that if I leave it there for too long, the next time I go back and listen to that memo, the magic is gone and I can’t hear what was going on behind the lyrics and the melody I came up with.
When I record that melody, I have an instant vision of what the rest of the music around it will sound like, and that creates the atmosphere for me and the feeling that I want to encapsulate in the song. So yeah, I need to act quick, otherwise it won’t develop.
FMM: What’s the weirdest time and place where you’ve recorded those memos?
KYARA: I would always be at work. It’s not necessarily a weird place, but when I’ve been in retail, I’m on a shop floor and I’m listening to music all day. It’s like overstimulation city. I’ve got my own music playing in my hand on top of serving customers, and I’ve definitely ran to the back room a few times to quickly record a voice memo.
I had that happen towards the end of one of my shifts, and I quickly recorded it on my voice memo app, and at the time, I was out somewhere a bit further away from work, so it was about a 40-minute drive to get back home. On the drive, I was trying to think of lyrics to go with it and I built up a whole pre chorus and chorus on this drive. I couldn’t record it, so I just kept singing it over and over and over to myself so I wouldn’t forget it the whole drive. As soon as I got back home, I pulled over and I recorded it on my voice memos app, and I went back to my room. I was dead tired and wanted to sleep, so I quickly built the most basic instrumental to go with it.
I’m still sitting on that song, but I was really happy with how it started to sound. Hopefully it becomes something, but that’s probably one of the most overstimulating rush jobs, because I just couldn’t stop and pull over to record it.
FMM: Was that the song inspired by The Summer I Turned Pretty? I saw that on your TikTok!
KYARA: Oh yes! That’s the early-stage demo. You could probably tell from the audio, but what’s funny is I’m not even Team Conrad, but the song was about Conrad. Everyone’s going to hate me. I don’t dislike him; I empathise, but I’m a Jeremiah girl.
FMM: There you go! I’ve always wanted to ask you this, but the sax solo in Bloodshot – what is your connection to the instrument?
KYARA: I’m a big ’80s music lover, and I think the sax was really present in pop music specifically in the 80s. I love that it became a little bit more mainstream and much more widely appreciated. When I was in my teens in high school, I loved The 1975 and they started including a lot of sax in their music. That was something I always wanted to do especially because it was an instrument I also grew up playing. As a child, before my taste in music started to develop, I was also a big The Simpsons fan, so I wanted to play the sax, and it just developed from there. My music taste has always leaned towards that nostalgic sound from the ’80s. When I was finishing up with high school, I started listening to The Midnight, and they also have a bit of that synth-wave pop electro sound with a lot of sax. I’ve seen them live as well, and it just comes alive when you hear it live, it’s great. I think it’s just got a certain magic, and its own big presence that a lot of other brass instrumental woodwinds don’t have. Every instrument is beautiful in its own right. They all have some quality for a little solo, but I just have the personal love for the sax in my music.
FMM: That is beautiful. I love on this track as well that there’s a bit of a build up before you start singing. It feels like a crescendo moment. What was going through your mind with that production-wise?
KYARA: With the production and the instrumental, it does mirror the story. It starts really closed off, muted, and vulnerable, which is where the story of the protagonist and the song start, where she’s a shell of a human, she’s been waiting around for someone and losing sleep over someone who left her. It then builds up as she starts to realise, “Oh, actually, you keep coming back to me.” It gets a bit more sassy with a bit more attitude, and it mirrors the self-talk you have when you’re going through that. Like, “Wait a second, I’m way too good to be sitting around waiting for someone who’s treated me like that.” The crescendo of a song, it’s like a catharsis, this big explosion of, a liberating feeling. She’s finally letting go of this person, and there’s that satisfying feeling because they’ve come back, and she can now say, “No, you can leave now. I’m not doing this again.” It was just to mirror the growing feeling of confidence, her opening up and coming back to her own, and it closes back up at the end.
With the production, I can’t say that every single detail was thought out for the story. It was more just how I felt and what I thought was needed at that time.
FMM: I love that there’s so much storytelling involved with all your songs. Yearn is a bit more of a sassy song and then Into the Dark feels a bit more mellow and dark. This song feels like a combination of both. Is there any territory, not just emotionally, but also creatively that you might want to explore?
KYARA: Yeah, definitely. Like you said, Yearn was a bit sexier. It had a lot more confidence and it was a bit more on that dark fem energy. Into The Dark explored more of a dark healing and a bit more epic. Bloodshot, it was a bit of a combination of both because it had that feminine energy, that sass in it as well.
The stuff I’m working on now that I will be releasing next, I want to be exploring a bit more of the dreamy side of synthpop. So, a bit more romantic feeling versus angry, getting over you vibes. We’ll probably see a bit more of a soft side of my music soon. One of the songs I’ll be releasing soon, I’ve had in the vault for a long time. I wrote it around the same time as Into The Dark, which was probably a few years ago now.
FMM: I love that because I think that’s how you build a really solid catalogue where listeners might not have been able to understand a song at the time of its release, but in five years or something, they might look back when they experience that emotion and go, “Yeah I understand that now.”
KYARA: You’re definitely right. As someone who always worked in retail for a long time, for nine years in one way or another, I’m always listening to music day in and day out, and a lot of the time it’s the same songs every day and we have the same playlist. There were some songs I remember back in the day that I couldn’t stand. Maybe it was because I heard them so much, not because they were bad songs but maybe I just couldn’t resonate. Now that I’ve taken a bit of a break from working retail super often, those songs on the playlist come on again and I’m like, “Oh, because I’m in a much different place with my relationships and other things now, I’m like, “Wow, I really like this, and I’m paying closer attention to the lyrics.” I can engage with them more, I can appreciate it on a different level.