K.Flay’s (Kristine Flaherty) latest album, MONO, triumphs several emotions, genres, themes and tempos. The album is a true work of tension and distinctiveness executively produced with Paul Meany. It is inspirational in every sense of the word and so is K.Flay. Becoming deaf in one ear is just one major life experience gained to create a record of vulnerability with movement of sound and psyche. MONO has allowed K.Flay to remember the joy in creation, has heightened her experimentation, showed her that she can create music and maybe even do it in a more fascinating and expressive way.

mxdwn: Were there any highlights from your last tour you’d like to share? Any favorite songs to perform live?

K.Flay: I think it’s always interesting to play songs from a new record live because you really don’t know what to expect and you don’t sort of know how audiences will have already engaged with the music because the record had been out like a couple days when we started that tour, or if it’s going to be completely new to them, so I always really liked that. I think for me, probably my two favorite songs from the new record to play were, “Are You Serious?” which is the first song [on the record] and our set opening track. It’s a very intense song in a lot of ways, and I really didn’t expect to enjoy it that much live, or for it to have that much energy, or for people to know all the words right off the bat. That was really fun. Then “Punisher” off the new record as well just continues to be, we started playing it live in May before it was released, but that continues to be a very powerful and kind of sick moment live.

mxdwn: Yeah, I could definitely see those two songs being very enjoyable to play live. You’ve previously said that MONO highlights a lot of major events in your life – from the loss of your father, to queerness, to finding your place in the music industry and sudden deafness. How has the songwriting process allowed you to tell your story and how has it helped you?

KF: Well, I think songwriting is a place where you get to be non-linear with a narrative and instinctive with how you approach a topic. You’re really able to kind of zoom out on themes in your life or moments in your life and see how they might be connected to other moments, or might be emblematic of other patterns or tendencies. I think that because songwriting is so freeform and has so few rules in a lot of ways. There is a general structure for songs, but there’s a lot of leeway and a lot of flexibility in there. I think it’s really helped me to just explore my experience and to do it in creative ways. I think when you have the ability to think, to be curious, I guess, about your own experience of the world – I do think it increases compassion for yourself and more importantly compassion for everybody else’s experience of the world.

mxdwn: Yes, definitely. You have some very vulnerable lyrics and I really appreciate that.

KF: Thanks.

mxdwn: It makes it very relatable. You have dabbled in and mastered a wide array of genres over your career. When making albums, and during your career in general, how do you find that balance of which to use when?

KF: You know, it’s never a very like overt process. I think it’s more just I’m inspired by different genres at different times in my life. There’ve been moments when I’ve been very inspired by rock and punk, there have been moments when I’ve been listening to a lot of hip hop and indie rap and a lot of things I listened to when I was young, when I was a kid. Then moments where I’m listening to a lot of electronic music and so I think it’s more like whatever I’m making usually is a reflection of what I’m kind of excited by. I do think it kind of goes in cycles for me and also for a lot of musician friends that I have where… you know, you’re sort of inspired by one thing for a year or two and then not to say you get sick of it, but you feel like you’ve kind of been in that space for a minute, so now you’d like to be in a different space. I think for me, it feels like I’m kind of consistently bouncing between those things, so it’s not even very pre-planned or pre-ordained. It’s more that I gravitate to places of inspiration and I think just, honestly the shit that I’m excited to listen to.

mxdwn: I totally get that. Even just as a listener, I feel what you’re saying. I go through cycles of a bunch of different genres and then you just kind of, not get sick of it, but like you said, off to the next one.

KF: Yeah, you just want to stay inspired. I think if you kind of bury your head in the sand of a single genre, you lose out on the opportunity to be in touch with all this other stuff. I enjoyed that jumping around.

mxdwn: Totally. Graduating with a double major from Stanford is not an easy feat. Aside from it being where you started your musical career, how did your time there influence your actual music?

KF: Well, you know, I don’t think it’s had a massive like concrete influence, in that I didn’t study music and I have sort of no training, formally, but I learned, I think, two really important things during my college experience. The first was how to be thorough and how to think critically, that’s helped me honestly so much with the engineering, production and technical side of music because there’s a lot of troubleshooting. There’s a lot of precision, a lot of very, very boring minutiae that you have to kind of wade through to get to the final product. So, that level of focus and attention to detail I think has just been really helpful. Even like learning Photoshop, learning how to edit, just all the kind of backend stuff that is part of being an artist in this modern era. I think my education was a huge part of the foundation for that. I think the second thing is, I went to college in the Bay Area. I grew up in the Midwest and the Bay Area is a very, very diverse place. There’s a lot of cultures, there’s a lot of different ideas historically and culturally. It’s a place that we know as a sort of a bastion of free ideas and self-expression, so it’s a very invigorating place to be despite the weirdness of Silicon Valley, right?

mxdwn: Yes.

{Both Laugh}

KF: Which it seems to be growing ever weirder, but there was an openness to experience and to other people’s experience of the world that I was very much encouraged to develop. I think that was maybe the most impactful part of my college experience, was really cultivating an ability to listen and understand and question my own biases, question my viewpoints, you know? And I think as a musician, as a person writing about human experience, that’s a really helpful and useful thing to have.

mxdwn: Yeah, definitely. I can totally see that happening. I kind of understand where you’re coming from because I’m from Florida and was raised in Florida and went to the University of Colorado, Boulder, so I get that like moving to a different part of the country, seeing a different kind of experience, it really does open you up. So, “Are You Serious?” is the first song on the album, like you were saying, you also said you opened with it and then I also saw it’s the first song you wrote after you experienced hearing loss. What was that like for you? Writing that song and then seeing it come into fruition?

KF: Well, I mean, writing that song cracked the door open for this record to be made and I think for a little bit of the spell to be broken psychologically in terms of like, answering the question of, can I do this and do I want to do it? It’d only been a couple weeks since I lost hearing and I was still very unsteady on my feet because I’d lost my equilibrium so I was still kind of just like a wobbly son of a bitch, but I think I had the instinct, you know, I’ve just learned in my life that exposure therapy works, like when you’re scared of something, you should just do it. That will be the thing that frees you from that fear, or at least gives you information that’s important. So, I hit up Jeoff Harris, who I worked on “Punisher” and “Perfectly Alone” with and was like, could we get in the studio? The night before, I have a voice note of it, but I’m kind of playing that baseline, that chromatic baseline, boom, boom, boom, boom. I was sort of freestyling and I just kept locking in on this phrase of like, are you serious and I brought that in, we just ended up having such fun and what I’ve never lost in the process of being a touring professional musician, despite all the weird, bad stuff, is that joy of taking a little idea and getting together either with a friend or just on your own and like turning it into a song. There’s real joy in that creation. I felt that again and not only that, but we made a song that was actually sort of formally rather interesting, like we have tempo changes, it doesn’t follow a traditional structure, we were able to replicate my tinnitus noise that I have in my unhearing ear. We did a lot of pretty cool experimental stuff and I was like right, okay, I can do this, but also maybe I can do it in a more interesting and more free expressive way. So, the short answer to that question is, it felt very, very good. It felt not only like relief, but it felt like hope.

mxdwn: That is very inspirational. How was it collaborating with Vic Fuentes and Kid Sistr, as well as Travis Barker on your previous album for “Dating My Dad?”

KF: It was great. All three were very different collaborations in different ways. With Vic, we’ve been friends for four or five years now and I’d been working on a demo for the song and it just wasn’t there yet. It was missing things. It was also like becoming this kind of heavy song and I hit him up. I was like, hey, I don’t want to bug you, but would you be interested, because we’d been sharing music back and forth as they were finishing their record and he was like, dude, yes. So, it was great because he had a lot of… you know, the beauty of collaboration, of course, right, is that you get somebody else’s brain and sensibility and taste. He had some really great instrumentation ideas as well that I felt really took the song to a much more exciting, sort of fleshed out place. With Kid Sistr, so Sarah, who plays bass in the band, she’s my girlfriend, we’ve been dating for a while now and this was like soon after my hearing loss, I had said to her, hey, do you want to maybe just write a song and just kind of as part of my like healing, you know? And we got in the studio and just made that song “Spaghetti” and I really never even gave it a second thought. I just kind of put it in the box of, well, that was an exercise in healing. But I had sent it to Paul Meany, my executive producer, with all the songs he requested, everything I had written since my last record, I sent it to him and he’s like, what the fuck is this song? This is the fucking song, and I was like, what, like Sarah and I just did that, whatever. He’s like, no, dude, we gotta finish it. I love that song, I wrote it with the person I love when she was helping me get better, there’s a playfulness, I think, to that song and a nostalgia that I really love. I’ve been friends with the Kid Sistr girls now for almost two years, so that was just a wonderful thing and very natural. With Travis, that was sort of a weird collab because it was during lockdown, so it was not your traditional collab. We had to do everything on Zoom, so it was from the era of that which was strange. Although, when you’re kind of left to be in your own studio with your own creativity, you approach things in a certain manner. He approached the drums one way and it might’ve been different if we’d been together, who knows. I really love collaborating. I think it’s pretty much the most fun part of music.

mxdwn: I can see how that would be the most fun part. You decided to have Paul Meany as an executive producer on MONO. What was that like?

KF: Oh, it was amazing. I told Paul early on that I was looking for productive tension and he gave it to me. He pushed me really hard. He pushed me in terms of arrangement, track listing, instrumentation, just my approach. I couldn’t have made this record without him, not like this. It was really helpful to have somebody who believes in you, is pushing you and Paul’s whole mentality was like, our goal here is to make a record that only you could make. It’s not to make a record that’s better than blank. It’s not to make a record that’s the next incarnation of blank. It’s to make a record that feels quintessentially like a K. Flay record, a record that only you, Kristine, could create. And I loved that perspective, because it’s a very loving perspective towards music, you know what I mean?

mxdwn: Totally.

KF: It’s about just inhabiting your yourself and your creativity and that’s all that matters, you know? It’s easy I think sometimes, especially with sort of the modern internet, to be drawn to the urge to put things next to each other and to compare them, I think that’s a real destroyer of creativity and of joy. So, it was great to have Paul just there to orient me.

mxdwn: That’s awesome. “Punisher” is a very introspective song. I think we all tend to be our own worst critics and sometimes tend to blame those feelings on others. When did you come to this realization and do you have advice for others who might fall into that category?

KF: I mean, I feel like I’ve been singing about this for a decade. I think this is a realization that comes to us all in waves, that we have moments of recognition, you know? I think for me, this is maybe the first time where I’ve really wanted to frame this idea of like, I’m my own worst enemy, right? We hear versions of that disseminated and portrayed in culture. But I think the flip side of that is, you are your own greatest hero. Within you is the power for anything. I think it’s easy to fall into that trap of, man, I caused all my own problems and maybe for a moment that is true, but also it logically means that you also have the capacity for all of your own solutions. I think there’s so much strength. Sometimes I say to my friends or my family, if they’re having a tough time, I’m like, everything you need is right there. It’s in you, you have everything. That’s my biggest piece of advice is when you’re struggling with how you want to live and how you want to be in this world, just know that everything you need is in you. And maybe the thing you need is curiosity and vulnerability to ask for help, right? I’m not saying everybody has all the answers and knows everything, but within you are all of the tools to be the sort of person that you’d like to be in your community and your own life. Just being able to locate my own personal power through that lens has been just really, really cool. I’ve watched my friends do it too, and it just makes you able to be a better community member and friend and child and parent and all that stuff.

mxdwn: Definitely. “Hustler” has an extremely relatable message, ‘Just because I know you, doesn’t mean I know you at all.’ What inspired you to write this song?

KF: Well, I think probably a lot of the relationships that I’ve had that have ended with some sort of a feeling of non-closure or a feeling of some betrayal. I mean honestly, the relationship I wrote this about isn’t even a romantic relationship. It’s a work relationship. I mean when you write songs, you kind of amalgamate things, kind of just combine. But it is about that strange, almost vertiginous feeling of being around someone, you spend all this time, you know them and then they do something that is really out of character, right? Or out of that conception you have of them, and you’re like, wait, do I even know you? You know?

mxdwn: Yes.

KF: I guess of course, can we ever really know anyone? Can we ever really know ourselves? So like, there are limits to knowledge, but that feeling of being hustled and that feeling of being sort of lured in and charmed. I’ve had that a few times in my life and it’s just a feeling I had never really written about, but I’ve had it and it’s an uncanny feeling. So, yeah, that’s really what that’s about.

mxdwn: I get that and I think the word hustler really paints it. I thought that was a creative way of putting it.

KF: Thanks.

mxdwn: Of course. “Chaos Is Love” kind of speaks to the emotions surrounding love and relationships that can be toxic and while you’re in it, that can be hard to recognize because we are told that love is chaotic. Also, the music is almost reflective of that feeling too. What was the creative process like for creating that song?

KF: The process was… the demo of it I wrote pretty quickly, although I only wrote two verses and the song was actually challenging to finish because I wanted to write a third verse that felt like it captured the feeling, at least, that I had at the end of a relationship where there were these elements of chaos, there was also tenderness still too, you know?

mxdwn: Yes.

KF: Because I think, sometimes when relationships end and I’ve certainly written songs that don’t have much tenderness, breakup songs without much tenderness, but there’s a time and a place for those songs. I think most breakups… many breakups do have tenderness still, so it was a challenge to figure out how to keep the song feeling tender and then also how to create a feeling of chaos in the music without it being like horrible to listen to, but also almost verging on like, AH, so that was kind of the challenge. Dave Hammer, who I produced it with, he and I worked on a lot, especially that final kind of instrumental outro, we worked a lot on how to end it. The original idea for it and everything came together very quickly, I sort of, that first verse I wrote maybe in one minute, 30 seconds because it just came out real quick, this idea of the raw egg on the sidewalk. Sometimes images like that are really helpful for me when I’m writing songs, they guide me, like an image comes to my mind and then the rest comes pretty easily.

mxdwn: That was a good metaphor, it captured it well. “Yes I’m Serious” contains some of the sincerest lyrics I think I’ve heard in a while, plus we really hear you rap on that song. Can you describe the process behind writing that song and the decision to rap it and record it like you did?

KF: Yeah, thank you. Well, my entrance into the world of music really and making music, was listening to hip hop. I love the medium and you get this wonderful opportunity in a rap song to say a lot. You know, there’s a lot of lyrics and so there’s just a lot of opportunity for wordplay, to explore a lot of things. I had kind of said to Paul, because I had written what is sort of the fourth piece of that just one day, I had worked on a beat with a friend and had written that just at my house, I really liked it, and I was like, man, but it’s not a song, it’s just part of something. Paul kind of pitched me on, what if we did sort of like a needle drop track, where we were really just dropping the needle in on these different instrumentals, these different moments, these different moods and we’re hearing something progress. So I wrote, I mean there’s kind of four movements to it right now, or in its final version I wrote probably, I don’t know, eight or something. I’d write something, I’d play and sing it for Paul and he’s like, eh… and I was like, yeah, you’re eh, you know, whatever, so okay, whatever, throw it out, you know? So I think just not being precious with lyrics, I find this with these longer kind of rap verses that don’t need to adhere to structure. They find their own way of making sense and the journey of this song is in many ways just the basic journey of how do I want to live in this world? What am I afraid of? I may sit here going, oh, I hate this place, I hate this place, but like, I built the place. So, if I don’t like it, I should go build a different place, so I think in some ways it’s a reminder to me. There’s just moments of levity too, but if you find yourself, in the speaking style of David Byrne, if you find yourself in a place you don’t like, consider building a different place for yourself, if you can.

mxdwn:  Yeah, just listening to it and then I was reading along with the lyrics and I was like, wow, this is really, honestly, some really real stuff that is so insightful. The lyrics and the music for “Perfectly Alone” seemed to pair perfectly with the times you’re talking about chaos being upbeat and then when referencing being alone, the song gets slower. Where did the idea come from to write it in this way?

KF: Well, the idea came because I wanted to write a song about what it feels like to get off stage before I knew how to get off stage and like, not drink a beer immediately. But, you know, it’s a really weird feeling because you play, typically, like your most popular song, the crowd is the loudest it’s ever been at the end of the show, right, whether you do an encore, it’s just the last song. It is this moment of just massive noise and joy and energy. For me, as a solo artist, I get off stage, I get put in the green room or the bus or whatever and then everyone leaves because everyone has to go do shit. So you go from this thing of like, maybe you’re in a room with 500 people, 2000 people, 20,000 people, whatever it is. Now it’s completely quiet and you’re alone and that is just a strange thing. I think me learning how to tolerate that feeling of sudden aloneness and quiet was kind of a proxy for me. Also, learning how to be just able to sit in my own discomfort more broadly, which is also just connected to me stopping drinking alcohol and a bunch of other things, but I think that was the lens. That was how I approached writing this song, which is just a song about the fact that at the end of the day, we’re all, not in a sad way in just a normal way, we’re all alone inside of ourselves. The goal, of course, is to be alone together and to be at peace with that aloneness. I think it’s taken me time to get like tools to be able to do that, but that’s what that song is about.

mxdwn: That’s super interesting. I can definitely see how that juxtaposition could be a little weird at first, for lack of a better word. You have a mini-doc out as well, The Journey to MONO, what was it like to film that?

KF: My experience filming the mini doc was really illuminating, because I hadn’t ever zoomed out on my whole life, my whole career like that before. I’d talked about parts of my past in a piecemeal way, but never in one sitting. It was great because Thomas, the director, was able to film at so many different points during the making of the record, so it felt like we were able to capture the spirit of the project as it evolved over time and not just in a single moment.

All photos by Mehreen Rizvi