More about: Sarah Kinsley

As of late, Sarah Kinsley has been taking the world by storm. From dominating TikTok, to releasing multiple intricately produced tunes, there’s seemingly nothing she can’t do.

Fresh off the release of her new single 'Over + Under' which announces June's forthcoming The King EP, we travelled (virtually) from Newcastle to New York, to get to know Sarah a little bit better.

Gigwise: How are you?

Sarah Kinsley: I’m great, the weather is sub-par, but yeah I’m feeling great. I’ve had a really good week.

GW: Getting straight into it: where do you find your flair. Any particular artists or sources to cite?

SK: Growing up I was so influenced by artists my parents listened to, like ABBA and Carole King. I grew up playing the piano so a lot of music based on piano really resonates with me. But nowadays it’s harder to define what inspires me as there are so many to choose from. I love Arlo Parks, she's such a wonderful way with language. I love Sylvan Esso at the moment too, it’s so intricate and inspiring. Oh yeah and Beach House has always been a huge inspiration. And HAIM,  I’ve listened to them almost too much.

GW: There’s no such thing as too much HAIM I’d say.

SK: I thought maybe after the first few hundred listens I’d be there, but I’m way past that now and still love it.

GW: You also take some inspiration from Marc Rebuillet. He’s someone who I find to be very underrated and I thought it was nice to see someone cite him as an influence.

SK: He’s got a bit of a cult doesn't he. You may walk into a room of like 100 people and only a few will know him, but the few who do are deeply in love and so so loyal. My first reaction to him was a scared confusion and not understanding what it was, but when you watch more of what he does he’s just insane, I don’t think anyone has a hold on what he really does. 

GW: A man of mystery. When did you know music was what you wanted to do?

SK: It’s hard to define music as a passion and music as a possibility for an occupation. I think it stemmed from my childhood for sure. Everything I did as a child was surrounded by music. My parents really believed in music education, and starting out playing classical, I eventually moved onto guitar and more pop-based things. I think spending my whole life studying and falling in love with music, I found it so hard to find something that made me feel the same way music did. I realised that there would be no way I would want to do anything else, so I set my heart on it from then.

GW: You attend Columbia College now in New York. How do you balance studies and your music career? I know if I was creating music at the same time as my degree I’d be well and truly stumped.

SK: I think having music as a hobby or just appreciating it is hard to do whilst studying. But the great thing about it is that I’m studying music. I often make songs for projects and then I end up using them professionally. The two worlds are not so distinct sometimes which is something I’m really lucky to have and experience. But it is hard to balance sometimes, you know like studying things and then switching to songwriting can really throw me off sometimes. This semester I’ve been doing a creative writing workshop which is so fun, I suppose it offers another insight into the whole musical process.

GW: So you study music, you produce your own music, write your own lyrics, and now you’re a viral TikTok star. Your last video to go viral deconstructed the really bizarre rhetoric that women can’t produce music. Did you think that that video would get the traction it did?

SK: It was so, so unexpected. I remember a couple weeks ago making that video. We were getting ready to release ‘Karma’ and I think it’s very easy to feel stuck sometimes in production, where it gets so easy to get lost in isolation, and I was kind of making the video for myself in a sense, to prove I could do it, but i had no idea it would get so much attention and and love. And it was so weird because for two hours after I posted that video nothing happened, it was dead silence, but then it just erupted. It just caught fire and it was sooooo much to take in. It was a really positive discussion being created from it, and a lot of people reached out to me and asked questions and reached out to one another. It was really nice to see, as women producers are oddly controversial for some reason, but the people who saw the video liked it and were so supportive. 

GW: It’s on  1.2 million likes now, which on TikTok is a lot. I’s really great it’s got that outreach. But you mentioned there your track ‘Karma’. What’s it like producing a song with so many layers and moments, I found it so atmospheric and so intimately produced, how did you go about doing that?

SK: Thank you! Writing and recording are two completely different beasts for me. I feel a very specific feeling when I know I’m ready to record, but finishing writing is very tough, lyrically every word has meaning, ”I”, “you” etc. have meaning, they have a reason for being there and the song isn’t the same without them. I want to choose the right thing. When it comes to the sound and the melody, I normally have the skeleton of the song prepared, like either a piano section or guitar bit and then I build on them.

‘Karma’ was different though because I started with the drums, something I never normally do. I’m not a drummer, but this song is based in this constant groove and when I got that I just worked from the ground up. Production is so beautiful and exciting, it’s how I know that the song is real and that it might work. I wanted to use spacey synths. I saved one of the synths as “space cowboy”, which is the exact theme I wanted to embody. This floaty, spacey wonderful thing.

GW: Where do your lyrics come from then?

SK: Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint the original starting point, but when very specific things happen, like I have an experience I want to express, the only way to do that is lyrically sometimes. Sometimes I begin with the words and find a structure through them, and then others I feel a story can only come out through a melody. There’s a song I’ve been working on that has this really rhythmic guitar pattern that just came naturally and just kind of grew from there.

GW: Are you taking this same approach for your next EP?

SK: I don’t think my songwriting process has changed since i was 12. Like the content and quality hopefully has, but the core process has remained the same. But yeah, most of the songs on there follow in fairly similar footsteps.

GW: And what can we expect from this EP? Have you set a specific theme or is it a nice mix?

SK: I’m hoping there's a clear path between my records. I don’t want them to be similar at all, more distant cousins than siblings. This EP is very distinct, and the songs are so different from each other, but they fit together really nicely. Don’t expect ‘Karma’ again, but expect some very different songs, that I hope everyone will love.

The King EP arrives 4 June via Everybody's Music.

More about: Sarah Kinsley