INTERVIEW K.Flay talks her new single 'Shy' and upcoming fifth album 'Mono': "It's a feeling I've had many times in my life: why am I so bold and brave here, and why am I so shy over here?"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Danielle Ernst
American singer-songwriter K.Flay (full name Kristine Flaherty) has released the second single ‘Shy’ from her upcoming fifth studio album Mono.
Written and produced by Flaherty with Dave Hammer, ‘Shy’ is an electrifying rock track with moments of frantic vocals which reflect the theme of the song - the anxiety of being so shy you are unable to adequately articulate your feelings. “I wanna get you close but I don't know how…Wanna take you back to mine / Show you what I'm really like / But I'm too shy,” she sings.
“In my music, I’m so comfortable being loud and brazen, but in my personal life, I can be a bit shy. Especially when it comes to romantic relationships,” Flaherty says. “I wrote this song after I’d just met my (now) girlfriend. And I sent it to her out of the blue. I guess I only know how to flirt through songs? It worked though. Dave Hammer produced this one and he and I have this crazy energy between us. I think when we get together to make music we're able to disregard the 'shoulds' and be purely creative together. A lot of the guitar parts were just freestyle takes, us messing around. but there was a wildness to them that hit us both in the right places.”
‘Shy’ follows on from April’s moody, rock-funk ‘Raw Raw’ as the first tastes from Flaherty’s fifth’s studio album Mono, which is due to be released on September 15. Co-written and co-produced in its entirety by Flaherty, the title is a reference to the monumental change to her life last year when she suddenly went completely deaf in her left ear.
After enduring multiple unsuccessful treatments, Flaherty considered giving up music altogether but instead chose to forge ahead and in the process found her creativity was heightened. Mono was finished in a matter of months, and she considers it her most accomplished and experimental album to date. Across its fourteen tracks she moves through different genres including upbeat pop, industrial electronic rock as well as the invigorating rock-pop-indie sonics she has made her own over the past decade.
Flaherty has been releasing music since 2003, initially as an independent rap/hip hop artist before segueing into pop inflected rock in 2016. Mainstream success arrived in 2018 when she was nominated for two Grammy Awards: Best Rock Song for the 2017 single ‘Blood In The Cut’ and best Engineered Album, Non-Classical for her second studio album Every Where Is Some Where. The album attracted streams in the hundreds of millions, and she has since released 2 more albums.
Flaherty can always be guaranteed to create music that is magnetic, intriguing and purely addictive. She blurs the line between so many genres that her sound is unique and definitively K.Flay and offers you plenty to indulge in despite your genre preference or mood. We recently caught up with Flaherty to chat more about ‘Shy’ and the upcoming release of Mono
Read our 2017 interview with K.Flay in issue 2 of Women In Pop magazine
Listen to our 2019 podcast with K.Flay here
Hi K.Flay it’s so lovely to see you. You, obviously, very recently released the I want to say chains dragging, thumping ‘Raw Raw’ with its killer video. But now we have shy, which I going to just say it, it's almost like ‘This Baby Don't Cry’’s older sibling.
Wow, that's mic drop, right there! That's a very astute observation, and you know what's very interesting as a side note is I'm on tour right now, and we're playing ‘This Baby Don't Cry’ on this tour. Sometimes songs take years I’ve found to just click live, something has to happen or we change the arrangement. And we did that with ‘This Baby Don't Cry’ on this tour, and it's the first time that song has really hit in the live space the way that I always imagined it would. We play ‘Shy’ like a song after, and is so funny you mentioned that because I've been thinking a lot about ‘This Baby Don't Cry’, and nobody has mentioned it to me in a little while just because it's an older song.
Isn’t that just nuts, because with songs, you're going to make them but the listeners are going to take them for what they will. ‘Shy’ is the cool older sibling that can stay out later and goes into all the clubs. It's got such a power and such a beat, which is what you always do. Talk to me about the creation of this one.
So in the words of my mother, this song doesn't sound shy at all. My mum came through with the best, the most pithy review! The genesis of this song actually involves the wonderful continent of Australia. The producer that I worked with on this on this song is Dave Hammer, he produced four songs on my new record. We made them in LA, but he's originally from New Zealand, based in Sydney, and we have extremely good chemistry. Dave and I have a very particular chemistry, like a chemistry of playfulness, which is excellent for creativity because what is creativity, if not play on some level. We were working on a variety of songs, but this is one of the first songs we did. It came together very, very quickly and one of the initial driving forces was the wacky guitar parts. Dave originally played that chord progression you hear in the chorus, and then those weird chromatic guitar lines, that was me just fucking around and Dave's like, ‘that's it, that's the take’. We had this spirit of spontaneity and joy as we worked on this song.
At the same time, like literally in that moment, I was past this breakup that I'd had, which was devastating but ultimately fine, as most breakups are! I was just starting to have a crush on someone who is now my girlfriend. I was writing it about ‘God, isn't it funny, here I am, I'm a rock musician and I'm too afraid to tell this person. I like them’. I get up on stage in front of thousands of people, but I'm too scared to just have this one on one personal interaction. So that's what I wrote the song about! It's a feeling I've had many times in my life when I'm like why am I so bold and brave here, and why am I so shy over here?
It's such a lovely thing to hear about from a soul and from an artist because quite often we either get the artist that’s far too cool for everything, or they're just so depressed. You're like appreciating the ‘I rock out’ element, but also ‘I can be a massive knob when it comes to my romantic life!’
I really appreciate that. I hope it's a song that sounds cool, I do think it has cool textures. It feels tough, but it's about feeling fundamentally uncool. Not in some false way, like ‘well, I'm fucking loser’, which, by the way, that's a fair way to feel and there are plenty of songs like that. It's like, ‘God, I wish I had the guts to do it.’ Some of the most confident successful people I know feel this way. It's scary to be vulnerable like that.
You are really cool, by the way. You just are. You always write with such swagger, there's disco rock there, there's glam rock that's just part of your being. However, at the same time, I imagine because of that, it's even harder and scarier to feel insecure and shy because you go, but I'm also this person.
That's an interesting point. I say interesting, because it's tickling a part of my brain where I think all of us in our lives, there are certain performances we do, right? Often those performances take place in the context of our work. So I think it's very interesting what you're saying, because there are many ways in which our performance self differs from our insecure, naked, third grader, whatever self. You’re right, there's a little bit of ‘but wait, aren't I…? Don't I do this? Can't I…?’ you know, there's a little bit of that double taking on yourself as you go through life trying to reconcile these different parts of your psyche, but more so just your way of being in the world.
Absolutely, and it's a question we all ask ourselves, whether we're on the stage or not. You, however, have had to really ask yourself that the last couple of years because you as a rockstar, lost your hearing, and then made an album, which is very Beethoven-esque. He did it a couple of times! But you know, that's pretty much your ballpark now!
Yeah, you know the hearing loss was totally sudden and therefore, utterly unexpected. I mean, it's unexpected period, but it wasn't any type of gradual thing. As I've been thinking about this record and beginning to talk about it, it's really interesting because that moment, it gave me an out. It gave me like, ‘Hey, if you don't want to do this anymore, you could do something else.’ The hearing loss came with all this other shit attached to it, which is like too boring [to talk about]. My manager, he's like my best friend, was like, ‘if we need to pivot, if you need to literally change, I'm with you, I'm riding with you forever’. Which is extremely lovely and sweet, but I think having that moment to really be like I could just stop and no one would question it, no one would bat an eye, they'd be like, ‘oh, man, that sucks’, I was kind of reborn into this world and I feel like this record is my debut record, even though it's my fifth record. I'm like a born again Christian, but I'm a born again musician.
That's so cool. This all happened when you were in the middle of a tour, and so there was no touring and now you're on a huge tour at the moment, you’ve got an album out in September. How does that feel for a born again musician comeback. Phoenix from the ashes.
It feels both very invigorating, and natural, and also very emotional. I've done a lot of crying on this tour. I'm grieving, I'm grieving what it's like to be in this world of noise, in this world of live music, in the chaotic world of the world - the world world, the capital W world. I'm grieving doing that with my full hearing. It's only natural, it would be opaque of me and not honest to say ‘oh yeah, everything's great’. I am energised, but at the same time I am going through that grief. I think they exist side by side, as grief does with everything in life. Like yesterday, my tour manager had to find me a room in the venue just to cry and I just like cried by myself for 30 minutes and then I played the show, you know? Because in my ear that doesn't hear I have this horrible tinnitus, and it's constant. It's like this crazy something nothing, and it's worse when it's loud. So it's just been crazy on tour, I feel like I'm going insane so there are moments where I'm like, ‘Oh, I losing my mind!’
What I'm curious about is the music you are making. I feel all your songs are so quintessentially you, they all have the same nose, the same sound, it's very much you poured into this music, which is incredible. But I feel like the few songs I've been hearing since your hearing loss is even so much more. it's like you magnified, which is quite incredible considering part of the biggest part of your music making was removed and then altered. How has that happened?
I think it's because in some ways it totally liberated me from preconception or rule. It's almost like a compass that's spinning a little bit, it can just go where it wants. It made it easier to create in a certain way and create more authentically because I was like, even if I can just do this, that's enough. It's just like my final fuck just got given, you know?
That's such a great line!
That's kind of how it felt. The first track on the record is called ‘Are You Serious?’ What that song is about is the two sides of that question. The first is something bad happened, something unpleasant occurs and you go, are you serious? You know, what I’m a musician and I lose my hearing? Are you serious? The second question, or the second intonation and inflection of that question is the important one - Are you serious? This is not a joke. Right now, I'm in Ohio and the sky is red from these wildfires [in Canada]. The Earth is a burning, this shit is not a joke. In the United States right now, you can't get an abortion in half this country. This shit is so crazy. We have a person who's trans on our crew, and we're in Florida and she’s afraid to be there. The misogyny, this denial of reality that is occurring is so crazy at this moment, that I feel it's more important than ever that we all ask ourselves the question, whether we are writers, musicians, carpenters, or we work in HR, it doesn't matter what your contribution is - are you serious? Because I'm pretty sure everybody needs to be serious right now.
It's so true. You come at it with such punch and joy and integrity which I think is a very hard thing to do, on some very, very scary and confronting subject matters. You do it without the lectern face.
Right. What's great about music, and what's great about life in general, you can take things seriously, and also retain immense joy and delight. Being rigorous and disciplined and serious in certain ways does not preclude those things. In fact, it actually creates the space so those things can be had. There's a reason that kids need a bedtime. It's so that they can wake up and be happy and have energy. When kids have no rules, they're upset and sleepy and cranky. You need sobriety, I don't mean alcohol I mean as an orientation, you need sobriety in order to have levity. Otherwise it's the Roman Empire all over again.
‘Shy’ is out now via Giant Records, You can buy and stream here.
Mono is released on September 15 via Giant Records. You can pre-order and pre-save now.
To keep up with all things K.Flay you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
