There are some things you can manufacture in the recording studio but one thing you cannot manufacture is pure tone. You either have it or you don’t. Kaya Stewart most certainly does.
If Things Go South was released today via Bay Street Records and Kaya is ready to share her unique vocal tone along with her personal songwriting with the world. The album which was co-produced and co-written with her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Father, Dave Stewart, is a ten song revelation that Kaya says “Is one-hundred percent who I am now,” she declares. “This is the Kaya I was working towards all along.”
Stewart tells me that while the stories are definitely personal, the album sort of came about swiftly and organically. Kaya says, “I didn’t know I was going to make an album. It was Covid and I was losing my mind like I’m sure everybody was and I ended up going to Nashville to see my Dad. Not with recording an album in mind but we just stated writing songs and by the end of the trip I pretty much had a whole album.”
I asked about her process of writing and recording and wondered if she typically goes into a situation like that with everything planned out. She tells me, “In the past, before I go into recording a song or a record I at least have something in mind I want to say or talk about. With this one it felt like it just came out and was organic. It felt like it was becoming itself and by the end of it, it all just came together.”
One of the tracks that stood out to me was the song ‘Til I Fixed It’. I loved the way the song brings you in and lets you get lost in her voice. I felt myself really focusing in on the story behind the song.
In the song, she writes, “A place by the ocean but I worry about the rain. Molehill to a mountain but I’d do it all again.” First time I heard that, I felt it represented someone that perhaps was dealing with a kind of self sabotage and not ever really enjoying the good, when it’s good. But they think about it later.
Kaya exclaims, “I’m so glad that’s how you took it! I feel like the cool thing about making music is that you can interpret it in so many different ways but that’s exactly what I wrote it about. I think it’s a common thing that people dealing with and it’s definitely something I deal with. In that specific song it’s more about a relationship that almost feels to good to be true. So there has to be some way that I have to mess it up.”
She thinks for a moment and says, “Those lyrics in specific are sort of like about having a place by the ocean but I worry about the rain.. It’s like having all of these amazing things going for me yet I’m still waiting for the other show to drop.”
You can almost get a sense of that theme in the title of the album – If Things Go South. One can almost feel her words when listening to the song in addition to hearing them.
Excited to see what’s in store with this talented singer-songwriter. Stay tuned.
-Tommy Marz
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