Sarah Kinsley: “I really wanted to honour the people that I lost in my life”
Sarah Kinsley is not a typical indie-pop star. Her lifelong love of classical music brought her back to America from Singapore to study music theory at Columbia University in New York, but by the time of her graduation, Kinsley was already a viral sensation leading a double life.
Kinsley’s cinematic debut album, Escaper, is a fitting title for her first outing and an appropriate summary of her approach to life. The singer-songwriter has called New York home for several years, but she was born in Los Angeles, moved with her family to Connecticut, and then to Singapore. However, The Big Apple is the spiritual home of her music.
The new record arrives more than three years after Kinsley first rose to prominence in early 2021 when she shared a simple video of her producing music in her home studio. The clip has had over 1.6 million likes and was made in response to the discussion about the lack of female producers, which she finds tiresome.
At the time, Kinsley didn’t consider the potential repercussions of a 45-second clip from the studio and the meteoric doors it would open. As a result, her audience significantly grew overnight, and her next single, ‘The King’, was streamed over 50 million times on Spotify alone. However, despite the eye and ears she found exploring her art, Kinsley didn’t rush Escaper and stayed an independent musician for two years before signing with Decca Records.
As much as Escaper is Kinsley’s first album, she informs Far Out that it’s been a non-linear journey that started when she learnt the violin at “three or four years old”. Although she’s gone down a different path, it’s an inescapable part of her artistry that remains even though her skills are utilised in another field.
“I loved classical music,” Kinsley explains. “Actually, I miss it a lot, but it was a very different life and a very different discipline than the music that I make now. I have a lot of early memories of growing up playing in lessons, and the specific teachers that I had were mostly women. It was one-on-one intimate lessons, and orchestras were such a place of camaraderie.”
In addition to creating her earliest musical memories, classical music is also where Kinsley became fluent in the art of performing. While she later started playing alongside orchestras, Kinsley began solo, recalling, “As a kid alone on stage, it was so nerve-wracking.”
Kinsley looks back upon playing as part of an ensemble as the “happiest I’ve ever been in life”, adding: “It was so life-changing for me to understand myself through the perspective of an orchestra.”
Without that upbringing in the classical world, Kinsley would not only be a less technically proficient musician but a different person, too. “The understanding of epicness and wanting to create a really big sound that is totally inspired by the classical music world that I came from,” she says of the classical undertones on Escaper.
However, once contemporary music entered her life, there was no looking back in an artistic sense. The love affair was sparked by an obsession with the radio while she lived in Singapore as a teenager. Still, it took years of songwriting behind closed doors before she felt capable. Kinsley modestly claims that she was initially “very bad”, and the songs were “very intense, very extreme, very dramatic”.
Kinsley admits: “I didn’t know at the time what a career in music looked like outside of going to conservatoire or playing in an orchestra. I had no idea what that would have looked like, so that entire thing just wasn’t even a possibility for me.”
At 18, she moved to New York and met like-minded individuals who opened her eyes to a whole new world of music outside her comfort zone. After growing in confidence, Kinsley began sharing music online, and during the Covid-19 pandemic, her songs unexpectedly blew up on social media.
Kinsley admits to finding the dopamine rushes from social media “addicting at the beginning” and “very overwhelming”, but ultimately, sees it as “a door opening”, albeit not the traditional path. Despite TikTok helping Kinsley immensely during her formative days, she thinks her breakthrough happened when it was still an “organic space”. In contrast, now, she believes, “It’s just so saturated with music that I understand why artists find it difficult to break through, and I understand why people get frustrated with it.”
The singer-songwriter also doesn’t think online success is more than numbers on a screen, noting, “I think labels rely too heavily on TikTok as a source to break artists; it doesn’t define artists. It doesn’t make an artist, and we put too much emphasis on, ‘Oh, well, if this song is connecting with so many people digitally, it must be the same in real life’. And sometimes it’s not. Sometimes, what happens in the digital universe isn’t reflected in the real world.”
In Kinsley’s case, there has been a correlation between social media and real life. She’s shortly set to head out on a world tour, and the validation from playing to rooms is a tangible feeling that far outweighs receiving bundles of likes on TikTok.
While she’s still relatively early into her career, there have already been several moments that have made Kinsley pinch herself, such as supporting Mitski early this year, which she describes as a “dream come true”.
Kinsley’s emotional and vulnerable songwriting, combined with the personal subjects she broaches, is why her songs have migrated from the digital sphere into the real world and earned the support of her heroes like Mitski. While she was initially reluctant to discuss the loss of her friend in her work as she didn’t want to “capitalise on an event”, ultimately, it was a necessary coping mechanism during a turbulent time.
“With this album specifically, I really wanted to honour the people that I lost in my life, and it’s hard to do that sometimes in music because music so can be very easily put into the box of like happy or sad, or major or minor, and I wanted to write music that was contradictory and complex,” Kinsley explains.
If that was the brief for Escaper, Kinsley completed the mission with aplomb. While the lyrics can be devastatingly heartbreaking at times, she expertly juxtaposes these dark themes with uplifting, euphoric moments that allow Kinsley to put a contemporary twist on her classical upbringing.
Although gathering the songs for Escaper has been emotionally challenging, it’s also been a source of catharsis that has let her tackle grief rather than hide from it. Across the 12 tracks, Kinsley proves that she’s a true artist and not another flash-in-the-pan social media sensation. Kinsley is here for the long run and set to stay relevant much longer than TikTok or whatever comes in its wake.
