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Interview: K.Flay on accidentally launching a music career, clashing with Danny Brown, and why she’s not fucking up her life

K.Flay can bring the party anywhere.

Born Kristine Flahery in 1985 just outside Chicago, she got mixed up in this crazy game called music while attending classes at Stanford University. Originally rapping for not only fun but as a way to blow off steam after her intense studies, K.Flay soon realized Bay Area parties were responding to her quick-fire approach and whipsmart attack. As she developed her style, her sound spread all over the map, and that diversity is evident in both her new EP off RCA Records, What If It Is, out last month, and her live shows.

Vanyaland caught up with K.Flay last month, just as her record dropped and she performed at the Nines Music Festival in Devens, Massachusetts, turning heads among Delta Spirit, Dr. Dog, and Walter Sickert. She’s back in the Bay State tomorrow night, when she hits a very sold-out Paradise Rock Club while on tour with Icona Pop. Roughly a thousand people will fill the Comm. Ave. club singing “I Love It,” but they just might walk out humming the biting hip-hop/EDM crossover jam “Starfvcker.”

Either way, the future is pretty bright.




Vanyaland: Do you prefer Kristine or K in conversations?

K.Flay: In conversations, Kristine is totally fine.

Cool. So congrats on What If It Is and the Icona Pop tour – you’ve got a pretty busy couple of weeks ahead, huh?

Yeah, I’m super excited. I love being on the road so I’m really looking forward to the tour and having new music to promote so I think it will be very good.

Is this the largest tour you’ve done, say in terms of length?

No, I’ve done some headlining tours that were brutally long. I think last summer we were out for a little over two months and it was hot as fuck, too. This is definitely a good length of tour, and we’re going to a lot of cool spots, and in between the Icona Pop shows, on days off, I’m doing my own headline shows, so it’ll be good.

The Icona Pop tour is quite the hot ticket at the moment. You’ll be playing packed rooms all the way through, that must be pretty cool.

It’s awesome and it’s a little bit of a different audience, and any time you’re the opening act… I really like opening up for people because it’s an opportunity to gain new fans and challenge yourself from a performing standpoint, trying to appeal to a different group of people. So I’m excited. I played a few shows with Icona Pop in the spring which were awesome so I have no doubt these will be a lot of fun.

The new EP is out on RCA Records, is this technically your major label debut?

It’s actually not. I put out another EP while I was signed… I guess? But it didn’t have the RCA logo on it. Actually, while I’m saying this, I don’t even remember – is that bad? [laughs] I should really get my shit straight!

I think I read that somewhere, that’s kinda the promo behind it: “Major label debut”

I think this is the first thing that we ever stamped RCA on and they had a large part in putting out, so yeah, let’s just say that.

OK, cool. We’ll I was gonna lead that into asking what led you to go with a major label, making the jump after releasing a bunch of mixtapes, when a lot of artists are having success staying independent or with smaller indie labels. Just curious as to what made you make the jump to a major?

[pullquote align=”right”]I think also it’s just a lawless time in the music industry in general. You have people signed to major labels who are not succeeding, and people who don’t have a label who are at the top of the charts.[/pullquote]I think for me it was the opportunity to have a potentially wide audience for my music, which is a goal of mine. You want to have as many people as possible to have a chance to know what I’m doing and be interested in what I’m putting out. And I think also it’s just a lawless time in the music industry in general. You have people signed to major labels who are not succeeding, and people who don’t have a label who are at the top of the charts. I think it’s an interesting time too for indie labels, and which indie labels have created a lasting culture that still exists, so… I don’t know, I had been talking to RCA for a while and they had come out to many, many, many shows and showed a lot of interest in me and support and understand my vision on things. So it was a really good fit.

It’s usually a vibe you get from them, I think, whether they are interested in building your career as an artist, as opposed to a label that just gobbles up a hundred artists and hope one of them hits.

Totally. I was talking to my friend about this, and it’s just so bizarre, right now, the means of production are so widely available, and now the means of distribution are so widely available. It’s weird, but it’s good.

Your story is starting to circulate and your background is beginning to surface publicly – is it true you only started writing music a few years ago while in college at Standford?

It is!

That’s crazy!

I honestly only kinda stumbled into this whole thing, it’s really weird. My best friends are people I grew up with and have known me a really long time, way before I ever did music, and they are still like “What the fuck are you doing?” I wasn’t doing it as a young person, but yeah – I was just chatting with a friend and stumbled into it. But it was a very happy accident.

Did you ever really expect things to take off?

In all honesty, no. I was only doing it in a non-intentional way. I was such a serious student, and I was studying all the time. My studies were my top priority, and music was this thing that had no rules, no precedent, and no pressure. And I just did it as a kind of release, you know? Study all day, then go play a house party.

And I think I just never really thought it would amount to anything. And then I started realizing — the change was, when I started out, I was all about being clever, or being a smartass or whatever, and that was fun, and it would elicit a certain type of reaction from people. But once I started writing emotional music, then it became something that I really wanted to do.

Was hip-hop always a passion, even as something to listen to?

It wasn’t! I could always rap really fast [laughs] so it was fun for me – I mean I grew up listening to rap and hip-hop, sort of, in the same way that I consumed all others kinds of music. I feel like for anybody born in the ’80s and up, it’s just a part of our “pop” world.

But I’m really talkative, once you get me going I’ll talk forever, so there was something about rapping in particular as an emotive expression that I really connected with. Every song is like a puzzle; I don’t really have a signature, or typical flow. I try to mix it up a bit, so it’s kinda like a cool puzzle every time I start working on things.




It’s interesting that you mention that because you’re billed, I guess, as a rapper, but it’s selling your diversity short. “Cops” I wouldn’t peg as a hip-hop track. “We Hate Everyone” is electro, and probably appeals to a totally different demographic.

It is a bit genre-less on some level and that really stems from me not really having rules for what I’m doing. It originally stemmed from not knowing what I’m doing — and I still kinda don’t. I love a lot of electronic music, indie, punk rock, and hip-hop, so there are elements of all those things in what I’m doing. And that’s cool.

My Top 5 favorite musician or artist is OutKast and what I like about them is that it’s similar. I know there’s a very strong hip-hop foundation, but if you look at the arc of both of their careers, there’s an interesting evolution, all types of music that doesn’t conform to a certain style.

You just did a track with Danny Brown, “Hail Mary,” which is on the EP and has been turning a bunch of heads — people are saying you took him to school on the verses. Have you caught wind of any of that?

[Laughs] What I love about Danny is — and I mean this in the best way — is he’s just an unhinged rapper. He’s just an unhinged artist. There’s something so visceral about his style and what he says, where I tend to be more… not robotic, but I have a different kind of vibe. It was cool to juxtapose those two things together when I was working on the track. The track is about this feeling of helplessness, and in the face of chaos, what do we search for and what do we want? So it was cool to have those two different interpretations on there; one that’s wild one ones that’s very much focused and sad, which would be me.




There a lot of emotional weight in your lyrics, senses of disillusionment, and I think a lot of what people our age are going through right now in 2013. Do you draw on real life experiences, or the world around you, or both?

I draw from my own experiences, and I told this to my family – I’m not clinically depressed or anything. I’m not completely fucking up my life. But whenever you’re creative, or however you’re creative, you draw on certain parts of yourself that you need to express in order to deal.

I’m sort of an anxious person by nature and a lot of that part of my personality gets heightened by virtue of this job. Like right now I don’t even have an apartment, I’m just bouncing around, and the amount of uncertainty that’s an inherent part of making music is hard to deal with, for me.

I think it’s hard for everybody, but in particular, it’s not how I like to operate. I think that brings up a lot of inner-conflicts, and also some of the stuff I draw from my own experience, but a lot of it is just stuff I see, both in the business and on the road. On the EP there’s a song, “Starfvcker,” and that’s just based on conversations that I’ve has with people and the weird, vacuous, sad part of the entertainment world, that — as I’m sure you know — well does exist. But I feel like what I convey is an extension of the truth, or I guess the truth is the seed and whatever comes out are my musings on that.

Wrapping up, what are you looking forward to the most on the Icona Pop tour?

Oh, man. You know what I’m really looking forward to? Ordinarily I play with a drummer, we’ve been touring for a while now and I love it. Two person, punk show. But now I’m adding a third person, my friend who’s an awesome DJ and awesome guy, doing more electronic stuff. So I think it’s gonna be a really cool, evolving set, which I’m really excited about. Anytime you add another person to the stage is changes the dynamic and adds to the unpredictable excitement. I think the foundation of this whole thing is the show, not the recorded music. My vibe, and the spirit of it, comes across very clearly in the live setting.

K.FLAY + ICONA POP + SIRAH :: Thursday, September 19 @ The Paradise Rock Club, 967 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA :: 9pm, 18-plus, SOLD OUT :: Facebook invite