INTERVIEW: KAINA
Photography by @DDesigns | Makeup by Ariella Granados | Outfit by Paige Pohlad
Raised by the power and love of her community in Chicago, KAINA shines as a bright light, illuminating the shadowy corners of life. She feels big, she questions it all, and translates the seemingly unfathomable into music that makes you feel seen, heard and a little more hopeful. We spent time chatting with her about her latest album, Next to The Sun, the power of identity, and how she’s found ways to authentically and gently navigate an often times painful world.
hope: Getting right into it! You’ve been in the Chicago music scene for a long time, since you were a preteen. It’s put you in spaces with a lot of amazing creative influences. How were you able to find your authentic voice in the middle of it all growing up?
KAINA: The beginning was the performance group I was in, The Happiness Club. It was made in the ‘80s, so it has this super corny name. It was this nonprofit where kids from all over Chicago could come to learn to dance and write songs and put on a show and perform. I was learning with kids from all the neighborhoods and classes and backgrounds. I got to be in a community at a young age. That was obviously really enriching for me because all of those skills ended up helping me as an artist. But it was also enriching because the person who is the director, Tanji, is like a second mom to me. She was an example of an adult who actually listens to kids and empowers them. We live in a society where older generations don’t look to us for answers, but kids are so smart and older people just aren’t listening. So, finding my voice was kind of easy because I was influenced by an adult who actually cared about young people and developing their voices and allowing them to speak up and feel their feelings.
hope: I just got teary-eyed hearing you talk about that. It just seems so rare to hear about a child being lifted up in those ways. It’s such a beautiful thing to witness what a community can do when it comes together in that way.
KAINA: Chicago community and culture, especially after-school programming, has that overall vibe. It was about making sure kids had the ability to talk about their daily struggles and understand themselves in the world.
hope: That leads into some questions I have that might feel more sensitive, but deserve space for you to talk about if you want.
KAINA: Okay!
hope: I read your interview with Pitchfork, where you talked about your hometown album-release and the pop-up restaurant you put together with your family. You were in this space where you were supposed to be celebrating your work, your culture and your strength in community, but it was all under the threat of raids from ICE. Those are undeniably violent and harmful circumstances to be existing under. I was wondering if, and how, performing and connecting with the people who were able to be there, shifted your view on yourself in the role of “artist”?
KAINA: I have always spoken up about my identities when I perform — I can’t help it. I can’t agree with the idea that someone might like my music but not support me as a person. It doesn’t make sense. I’m creating art from my identity, so there’s no way you could support me if you don’t support immigrants or people of color in general. When I perform, I am always creating that space, and if I’m performing in whiter spaces, I really try to make that space for myself, even though I am uncomfortable. Maybe it does come back to the Happiness Club, because that was about having positive values and speaking up about what’s going on for you as a kid. Every performance I can’t help but talk about where I’m coming from, but that particular moment was more difficult. I was getting messages from people who were sad they couldn’t come because they were scared. And I got lucky because I had this friend from high school, Anthony, who’s working somewhere in the government, who I asked to come out to the show to talk about getting documentation and how to feel safer, because he knows more about it than me. It was such a shitty feeling, but it would have been wrong of me to step out on stage and not talk about it with everyone there.
hope: Yeah, especially when those are things that are widely suppressed and ignored by white American culture and the government as a whole right now.
KAINA: Yeah, and if you’re a young kid, you are told from your parents, like, “No, you can’t talk about this. You can’t talk about us being undocumented because it’s not safe”, so you’re suppressing a lot right at home, too.
hope: There is no checking one thing at the door. It doesn’t sound like it changed the way you see yourself as an artist because you can’t separate the two.
KAINA: Yeah... I think that’s why being in music is really difficult for me sometimes, because the industry isn’t so diverse, it hasn’t caught up really. It’s still business, it’s still capitalism. I feel like people try to force me to separate myself from my art. I’m an emotional baby, so it’s really hard for me to be like “okay, yeah... I’m just not gonna talk about it”.
hope: Which, even if you could separate them, would seem to go against everything your music shares. And that’s something else... Your album Next to the Sun, has such a unique ability of holding your audience on a threshold between the music and movement sonically and this room of reality and tough questions and big feelings on the other. But you still care for your listeners. You hold all of us so well, but how do you hold and care for yourself while navigating through the world?
KAINA: I definitely struggle with holding myself together, but I think that’s kind of the point of the album. When Sen and I wrote “Could be a Curse”, it was serious, but also kind of a funny joke between us. I think everyone feels alone, but it’s not true. That’s the point of Next to the Sun for me, we all have a bunch of feelings that we all feel and we don’t talk about enough and then we feel really alone because we don’t create the community and space to have emotions.
hope: It’s beautiful how music forces you to engage. It can just command you to feel something, whether you wanted to or not, and then you have to talk about it.
KAINA: Yeah! In “Ghost” I say “no one feels the way I do”. There have been a lot of people who write reviews who say “that’s such a silly thing”, but I wrote it on purpose because it’s a silly thing. I remember writing that part and being like “is this stupid?”. But that’s the point. It’s not stupid, because we’ve all thought it.
hope: The album does that work of touching on all the things we collectively feel and think we’re being stupid about. You created space for the existential dread we all swirl around in and those little every day fears of “Okay, but does this person like me back?”. I remember listening to “So Vast/So Small” and “Next to the Sun” and just being like “Oh, yeah she gets the paradoxes here”. Did you always know you were going to fit those pieces together?
KAINA: I don’t think so... I feel like I made Next to the Sun and was just like “Okay…” Then I listened to it, and was just like “Oh! I get myself now.” Every song comes from a little snippet of a moment of how I was feeling and then I put it all together. If I could ever be like “Oh, this is how KAINA is in her brain” it would be Next to the Sun. It’s mishmash of all these themes, of feeling so big and so tiny, of feeling like a stupid young girl because I don’t know if someone likes me. It’s so stupid and silly that I could put it all together in an album, but I love it. For me, sometimes it’s really hard to exist in the world. I feel like I don’t really fit in anywhere. We instinctively try to thread out all these different parts of identity. I think it’s really important to acknowledge identity and thoughts that are different from everyone, but at a point it also becomes isolating. Even sometimes when I’m like, “I’m a first-gen Latina”, that sometimes feels really isolating. So, then the music industry considers me a “Latin” artist versus an R&B alternative artist who happens to be Latin. You know what I’m saying?
hope: Yeah, and that all ties back to when you were saying that the industry seems diverse, but the thinking and roots of it really aren’t. Your identities of being first-generation, of being a woman in the scene, those identities shape a part of the reason why you’re so important, but you’re also much more than those two things.
KAINA: And it should just be a standard! I remember in Chicago, when people started putting together women’s showcases. At first, it was really exciting that all this time was being dedicated to women. But then people only wanted to book you for all women bills. And now it feels similar with Latin music being more popular. It gets to a point where they only want you on the Latin bills. Obviously, it’s an important thing to have identity. Not everyone has a fair shot in the world and it’s important to call that out, but to a certain extent it starts to be a commodity and isolating.
hope: I mean, it often just becomes others capitalizing and making money off of folks from their identities. The line of authentic appreciation and wanting to lift people up versus exploitation is very thin.
KAINA: Yeah and I have to navigate that everyday. On one end, I really love being part of the women and Latinx scene, but it’s also really weird when it’s bigger organizations that don’t hold those identities. It's case by case and by what feels good for me.
hope: And only you can decide what makes sense for you, which is essentially what you did with the album. So, Next to the Sun has been out for about 6 months now. How is that feeling? Now that more of the active work is done, have any gems exposed themselves from it?
KAINA: I haven’t listened to it in a while... But every time I perform a song I find more love and meaning in it. My relationship only gets deeper with it. It was kind of a crazy time to make it and put it out and I’ve been on tour since. I’ve only just been home for a month or two, so I’m still simmering on it. I’m processing the last six months of my life.
hope: Which is to say, your relationship with yourself gets deeper. Tender! Do you have a treasured memory from your time of creating it?
KAINA: It was a special time. Making it with Sen... He really forced me to finish it. If it wasn’t for him I would not have finished it, to be honest. He made me deal with my feelings and make songs. That’s where we’re at now, everyday he’s yelling at me to make songs and I’m just like “No! I don’t have feelings!”
“Green” was really fun to make! I was leaving my house to go pick up Sen from the airport, and I had this random idea. The demo for that song is just me tapping on my thighs and singing the hook. That’s the only song we actually recorded in the studio with all the instruments, so that was really fun. Just me yelling at Sen about the salsa songs I wanted him to reference, and him being like, “I can’t just learn that right now” and me being like, “Yes, you can!”. He wrote all of it though, all those beautiful changes and parts. It was amazing. That song pulled the album together for me. “Green” was the last song I made, it made everything make sense. It was just the theme of trusting yourself, your gut. It became a beautiful tie to generational-feeling and honoring my family.
hope: That video is stunning for so many reasons, how it was shot, how things were framed. Everything is so vibrant! That music video, your merch, your album art, your styling, they’re all steeped in such rich colors... Does color play a role in your creative process?
KAINA: I think it does. I work with my best friend, her name is Paige, we’ve been best friends since we were nine. She’s an amazing artist and singer, she’s actually on the album. She’s so multi talented, but right now, she really wants to make clothes for people and do things on film. So, all the clothes and the shoots, especially the Pitchfork outfit, that was all Paige. The all pink outfit, these sparkly sequin black pants, she made them. She just knows. All the colors... I’m just channeling what I feel. A lot of my style references come from Donna Summer and Celia Cruz, which is the vibe of my music, like Motown Salsa Baby!
hope: Motown Salsa Baby!
KAINA: Haha yeah, that’s the name of the next album!
hope: Haha next album name or new Instagram handle. The interview can be done now, we got Motown Salsa Baby, we’re good.
KAINA: Haha yeah, I’m good with it!
KAINA plays at Higher Ground with Durand Jones & The Indications on February 23rd. Get tickets to the show here and stream Next to The Sun on all streaming services.
THIS ARTICLE WAS GRACIOUSLY CONTRIBUTED BY:
G Cenedella is a writer, performer and curry-enthusiast in Burlington, VT. You can follow her work and shenanigans on Instagram @thesweetbbyg.