INTERVIEW: Kita Alexander releases new EP 'The One': "I’m just writing from my own shit, and everyone goes through shit, we all go through quite similar experiences in life and it’s all relative."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: XingerXanger
Australia’s Kita Alexander is the kind of natural musician where music is not just a passion or what she does, it is an intrinsic part of her soul. A professional musician since her early teens, she released her first single in 2015 and in the intervening years has become a critically acclaimed and commercially successful artist, despite much of the time flying under the mainstream radar, with her songs regularly attracting streams in the millions. Her soundscape is always warm and immersive with an electronic pop vibe while also remaining completely uncategorisable in the best way possible.
Today she releases her new EP The One. A collection of four previously released singles and two new songs, it was created across the world in Los Angeles, London, Sydney and Melbourne and included several high profile collaborators including Julia Stone, Nick Littlemore (Pnau) and Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Conan Gray) with Alexander revealing all the songs have been in her portfolio for many years but never finished or recorded until now.
“This EP is a collection of songs that were born in the past. Almost all of them began even before my own kids were born and were then finished across Zoom in the COVID lockdowns,” she says. “For me these songs have had such a special hold on my heart, so much so that I felt I couldn’t create anything new until these tracks saw the light of day. They’re stories of heartache and heartbreak, mistakes and memories, love and loss. They’re the framework of my life before I became a woman, a mother and a wife. The life I lived when it was just me in this world.”
The EP kicks off with ‘Run’, a bright and sunny sounding pop track that evokes hazy summer days cruising along the coast in a car, however its lyrics cover a darker subject. “It’s all about being in relation with someone who is unsuccessfully fighting they’re own internal battle and in the process dragging you down along with them,” Alexander said on the song’s release.
Second track ‘Storm’ has a slightly experimental edge to it, with its pared back, ethereal verses, swooning background vocals and a soaring, choral chorus. ‘Ocean Blue’ is arguably the highlight on the EP, with its gorgeous, poppy chorus, dreamy melodies and a hint of the 1980s in its overall vibe.
‘Memories Of You’ introduces a harder guitar-rock sound while remaining an electronic pop song in the main. Lyrically, it is probably the most important song on the EP as Alexander recounts her experience of sexual abuse. ‘Thought you were a good guy / How did it end up like this? / I’ve got these memories of you / God help me I know they’re true,’ she sings.
Title track ‘The One’ is a lush, electro-ballad and is probably the most melancholic song on the EP as Alexander confronts the collapse of a relationship ‘I’ve got to let go / This will never be home / I thought that I would be the one’.
The EP closes with ‘Killed A Man’, a moody, dark track that again confronts the end of a relationship but this time it is Alexander that is ending everything and grappling with the guilt that comes with breaking someone’s heart. It’s a remarkable track, switching between a shuffling beat, and sparse, acoustic sections, playing with structure in a way that makes the song feels familiar yet also completely different. It is a spine tingling way to end the EP.
In many ways, The One is Alexander’s best work to date. There is a depth, and sonic experimentation to the music that at times is breathtaking and by showing us new sides to both her personality and music she sounds more confident, and assured, than ever before. Definitely one of music’s end of year highlights, The One is a collection you will be scrambling to hit repeat on continuously. We recently caught up with Kita Alexander to chat more about the creation of the EP.
Hi Kita, so very lovely to speak to you again. You have your beautiful EP The One out which is such a glass of brandy for the chest cavity.
Oh, thank you. That’s so nice of you.
All your music comes with such a confidence, but it’s always like you’ve got an old soul. Even when you’re singing about pretty intense things, it comes from this resonance of a very old person looking back on their life.
My husband calls me a granny!
Have people always said that about you?
Not always. When I first met my now husband, he was 25 at the time and he didn’t know I was 19. We were with friends, and the friends go, ‘oh you’re 19, right?’ And Owen choked on his drink! No one has really been able to pick my age. I’m really tall, that probably doesn’t help either. I’ve just had a lot of life experiences and that makes you grow up at a young age. I’ve been like looking into this recently, and I’m a Pisces and apparently that’s the last star sign and it means you’ve learned all your lessons on this earth and you can move on to the next level after that.
Well, there you go. You’re at the end, the rest of us are just slumming it down at the start line!
I don’t know, I don’t feel smart, but apparently you’ve learned all your lessons in life.
You’ve got a very Leonard Cohen meets Nina Simone swagger to your voice and it’s absolutely perfect because the songs on this EP are old songs, aren’t they? Songs you first wrote a long time ago? The lyrics are the same, but I imagine your perspective has shifted which you can really hear in the way you perform them.
Yeah, they all started a long time ago and they are stories that were in my past, but I’ve updated them a little bit, but not too much. They are still moments in time from a long time ago. I couldn’t for some reason wrap my head around writing new music until I knew these were going to come out into the world. It was like I’ve got them there, I don’t want them to go to waste, if I keep writing music and they don’t come out, it was a really big thing for me to be like ‘I need them out’. I need to get them off my personal being.
Absolutely, one track in particular that stands out to me is Killed a Man.
Wow. Does it? You love it?
Yeah, I can totally see your youth, you are singing this song in bars just to a roomful of dudes crying into their pints.
Oh, how awesome. I’m so glad you resonate with that because that’s such a funny track. Dann Hume and I wrote this in Sydney just before COVID and then it took on so many different life forms. It has gone from 80s synth, to country…it’s gone everywhere. And actually right up until the deadline I was like ‘something about is not working for me now’. And we went back to probably the third demo, it’s probably had 20 different versions of it, and we went back to the third demo. I said to Dann ‘I’m so sorry, I feel so bad. You’ve done all this work, but it had something so special in this third demo’. And I said to my A&R ‘can we just ask them take the phone effect off the vocal’ and he goes ‘Kita, you sang it on voice memos and sent it to me’. I was like, oh my god, that makes me even cooler, okay, leave it on! So, it’s not even recorded in the studio, and I’m so glad you like it.
It’s such a good song this is where your old grandma comes in because only someone of a certain age can look back at the time when they really were screwing someone around, but look back on it with sadness and kindness as opposed to blaming whatever situation you were in. ‘You’re wearing your heart on your sleeve and I broke it into pieces’. It’s such a beautiful track and I’m so pleased with the production you went with because it really, really serves the song. It’s beautiful.
Thank you. I got goosebumps when you said that!
It’s so good. I want to talk to you about the opener ‘Run’. It sounds like this breezy drive song, gorgeous vocals, and then you start to pick into the lyrics and this is a dark song. Can you break it down for me?
I was going through a time in my life where I had been through so many dark moments personally and I was really wanting to get out of that. The people I surrounded myself with were going through really hard times also. You know when a friend is going through a really tough moment in their life and they need a friend to lean on? [I realised] I was that friend, that person in their life and I couldn’t handle it because I’d already been through so much dark stuff. It just made me feel like I was running away from friends, close family members because I couldn’t handle not exactly dark times but just moments in life.
It’s a beautiful discussion to open up now particularly in a world where everyone’s checking in on mental health but there’s very little conversation around the support network.
Yes exactly. Now I can be there for people, but in that moment in time when there’s a lot of people around you that are going through heavy things, you can’t be the support person for everyone. You can’t hold everyone up when you’re struggling to hold yourself up. It made me run away from a lot of people in my life because I couldn’t handle it.
What you are saying is so important, because we always feel like we have to be everything for everyone. You’ve chosen to put it together with such a beautiful, almost uplifting melody. What was the decision around that to make it a dance-cry song?
The producers I was working with for that song, they work in such an interesting way. The producer, Donnie Sloan would pull up a track and be like ‘no one think about anything, Kita get up’ and he’d put [me and] Nick Littlemore to the mic and he’s like, ‘just sing, just sing whatever you hear straight into the mic’. He put heaps of autotune on so we didn’t fuck around too much trying to figure out what we were singing. I heard something in what Nick was singing. I was like, 'the autotune took it to a cool place’ and then I got up and sang the chorus straight away. I was just like ‘wow, this is the chorus - ‘stop making me run away’. That became the song and then I fleshed that out. What’s this idea, what am I feeling here, why is this coming out of my mouth? And it just happened. There was no real decision, it just flowed out really.
This whole collection is so beautiful because they are reflection songs. And of course you have ‘Memories Of You and I want to pick that scab because it’s a hell of a scab. It’s a song of survival, sexual abuse and obviously, it’s a very personal song but you sing it not just with memory but you sing it for people. The way you sing it the rage is softened and that’s come with time, and it’s got such a beautiful delivery because of it. Things have changed so much since Tarana Burke’s MeToo movement in 2006, did you want to song to not just to heal yourself but heal others?
I don’t think I was thinking about others and you said a really good thing about time and how it softened it. There is some anger there, but the song was something different. The chorus for ‘Memories of You’ was a different song, and it was more of a love song. It wasn’t what you think it should be before you dig into the lyrics. But then, when I wanted to write about the topic of this song, that chorus was in the back of my head and I was like ‘well this is perfect because I need to get it off my chest, it’s a memory, it’s something I need to write about’. For me song writing is so therapeutic and if I don’t get it off my chest through song writing, I don’t think I really do get it off my chest, ever. So many friends after I released the song are like ‘fuck, Kita, we didn’t know, we’re so sorry’. This isn’t me putting a song out for people to feel bad for me, it’s literally just therapy and I don’t feel sad now that it’s out in the world. I don’t want to cry if someone brings it up. I’m so stoked it’s, it’s finally off my chest. It’s just out there, it’s not on me anymore. That’s what I said about the whole EP, they’re just songs I had to get out into the world and not maybe overstay down here.
It’s so good. All of the songs are so beautiful because they’re just so human. We can see the person that you are and relate to that.
Maybe it’s why they resonate, because I’m not trying to just appeal to radio or appeal to other people. I’m just writing from my own shit, and everyone goes through shit, we all go through quite similar experiences in life and it’s all relative. They are different to degrees, but really there’s love, there’s loss, there’s heartbreak, there’s excitement, there’s joy, and we all feel it.
The One is out now via Warner Music. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Kita Alexander you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and Twitter.
