Features Track By Track: Kyla La Grange – Ashes

Since her first singles surfaced in 2011, Kyla La Grange has been busy building herself both a following and a first album. With the finally formed ‘Ashes’ ready for release next week via ioki Records/Sony, Kyla gives DIY a track by track guide to her emotionally driven debut.

1. Walk Through Walls
The background to this song is that I went to a big house party and lay on the floor all night while people stepped over me. It wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had at a party. I was pretty bad company. There was someone there who I really wanted to talk to but I couldn’t, so I just lay there in the room next door and imagined walking through the walls to get to them. In the end that didn’t happen, but I did spend the next month writing this song.

2. Courage
This is one of the few songs on the album that isn’t written about my own experience - it is about a friend’s girlfriend, although I had been in a very similar position once, so I suppose I identified with her. Sometimes even if you know someone can’t feel for you what you feel for them it’s impossible to accept it. You’ll do anything to keep them, even though you know it’ll end horribly.

3. I Could Be
This song is about longing, about wanting to want. It’s about the things you could be but are not, all the things you could mean to someone else but don’t. I felt a bit deadened to things when I wrote it - I really wanted to feel something and be something to somebody but I wasn’t. Cheery! On the bright side, I love performing it live, it always seems to flow really nicely.

4. To Be Torn
This is a very, very sad song. I mean, they are all fairly sad, but this one sometimes still makes me upset when I sing it. It took me so long before I was happy with this recording, because it felt so close to the bone emotionally that every recording felt kind of inadequate, like it didn’t express it well enough. It probably means the most to me out of all the songs on the album.

5. Vampire Smile
This is the oldest song on the record: I wrote it six years ago when I was nineteen. I never really thought about it that much but I started noticing that more and more people would ask me to play it at gigs, or send messages saying they liked it, and I realised that for whatever reason it just clicks with a lot of people. I suppose it’s because everyone’s been obsessed with someone to the point of madness at some time or another, maybe.

6. Woke Up Dead
This song had a peculiar start - I just started humming that first vocal line to myself one day and then I looped it in garageband and started adding the other little vocal parts over the top. I was really angry at the time I wrote it though, so that’s why the song has so many heavy guitars and quite a loud chorus. I kind of liked the juxtaposition between these delicate spooky verses and the angry choruses, sort of lulling the person it’s about into a false sense of security and then hitting them on the head with a big rock. We used an ebow on the bass for all those subby shaky noises, which I loved the effect of and was really interesting to record. Our bassist Matt has to learn how to replicate it live now though…

7. Been Better
This song started out very folky, but I felt like the chorus should feel big and rocky; again I was angry (at myself) when I wrote it so I didn’t feel like writing a mellow folky song, I wanted it to have a bit of bite. My band were amazing at bringing this to life: they totally got it and I love the drums and guitars. The whole thing just came together very quickly and very naturally when we rehearsed it, and now we nearly always start the live show with it.

8. Heavy Stone
This song is very important to me, partly because I feel like though it was written about a particular person at a particular time, it is relevant to many parts/times of my life and I can always identify with it. The song is about wanting someone to forget you, so that they can move on. It took me so long to work out how I wanted to record/produce this song. I think overall there have been four very different versions, because I never felt like I’d got it right. The version we released as a single was, for me, too overblown – it had too much in it and was too fast and loud. I felt like all those things took away from what the song originally made me feel when I wrote it. When I recorded the stripped-back version for the album, I felt so happy that I’d finally found the right way to do the song. I knew straight away that this is how I should’ve done it all along, and I’m so much happier with it now.

9. You Let It Go
This song is a bit of a strange one; I had a lot of busy thoughts flying around my head at the time, and a lot of guilt. Sometimes I really like building up rounds of vocals, just layering one line on top of the other, because I feel like it echoes what goes on in your head when you have loads of thoughts and feelings rushing around – you can’t focus on just one line but they all kind of jostle around together.

10. Catalyst
We tend to always finish with this song at gigs because it has such a nice slow build – it starts so quiet and delicate and then at the end it kind of just lets go of itself. This is one of the few songs where I actually really loved the home demo I made before I properly recorded it (usually my demos are rubbish and I can’t wait to record things properly), so we tried to capture what was in the demo as much as possible.

11. Lambs
This song was one of two on the album produced by Marky Bates, and he really brought a lot of his programming expertise to the table. Lambs was just a little folk song that I used to play with just me and my guitar, but I really wanted to do something different with it because I found it wasn’t moving me any more. There is a Cat Power song called ‘American Flag’ where she reverses the sound of a kick drum, and I loved the effect it had, so we build the song up around a reversed kick drum beat and handclaps – it was a lot of fun to do. I wanted to just create a world around the song that was sympathetic to the melody but also interesting in its own right.

12. Sympathy
This was probably the last song I recorded for ‘Ashes’, and I loved it so much that I wanted to put it in, but it didn’t seem to fit, so I put it on the end as a secret track (shhh..) and hoped people would come across it when they left the CD running. I always loved finding secret tracks on albums, so I think it’s a nice thing to do.

Kyla La Grange will release ‘Ashes’ on 30th July via ioki records / Sony, the album is available to pre-order now.