Interview Sarah Kinsley: “Getting into music wasn’t really my choice at the very beginning”

Born and raised in Connecticut before relocating to Singapore with her family during her early teenage years, the now New York-based multi-hyphenate has had a deep connection with music for most of her life. “Getting into music was not really my choice at the very beginning,” she laughs, calling in from NYC on one of the hottest days of the year so far. “I mean, I don’t know how much choice you can ascribe to a four-year-old kid playing an instrument!”

Encouraged by her parents to learn piano, she soon found herself immersed in the world of classical music and youth orchestras, but despite fostering a passion for the genre, it wasn’t where her future lay. “I loved it so much,” she explains, “but it was always a big thing with different teachers that I was just way too emotional of a piano player. It was weird growing up in that world, because you had to have a perfect balance. If you’re too disciplined and technical, there are certain pieces of music that you just can’t really play, and if you’re too emotional, you can’t play anything because it’s like there’s almost too much feeling. I was always on that side of the equation.” Instead, after spending her teenage years digging into US radio and mainstream pop music during her Singapore school days, Sarah discovered an entirely different kind of sonic perfection, and was similarly captivated.

Returning to the US and enrolling at Columbia University to study music history and theory, she immersed herself in the New York campus’ art and music communities. “I was getting really into who else was part of the music scene, outside of the academic sense,“ she notes. “Going to shows in basements and whatever fraternities, going to watch jazz kids play – I was really leaning into that. The environment just felt way more open.” Invigorated to begin producing her own music, she soon found herself the centre of her first viral TikTok storm, when a clip she made in response to the comment “women don’t produce music” took on a life of its own. It wasn’t the last time her creative output would be picked up by the algorithm and make headlines either: her gorgeous 2021 single ‘The King’ has had almost 50 million Spotify streams since its release.

Now, with four EP releases in as many years under her belt, the musician’s attention is finally turning to her debut full-length; an album that manages to distil her passions for pop and classical, and meld them together into a cohesive, grandiose soundscape that puts emotion at its very heart. “I think the title evokes exactly what I’m trying to get into,” she says of ‘Escaper’, “which is, in a sense, a word that can convey something grand, but also very terrifying.”

Much like the songs themselves, which teem with a familiar rush of emotion while also feeling fresh and liberating, the record’s titular themes feel comforting but intangible; a yin and yang, much like her musical life so far. “It’s a collection of a lot of songs about loss and about endings; kind of grief in a very, very big, encompassing way,” she tries to pinpoint. “Grief for a lot of different things and mourning things. But then on the flip side of that, there is also this kind of beginning. It’s like this moment in between those things that I’m trying to capture and that I feel like I’m moving towards.”

‘Escaper’ is out on 6th September via Verve Forecast/Decca.

Tags: Features, Interviews, Neu, From The Magazine, July/​August 2024, Sarah Kinsley