Interview: Kylland haunts with double singles, ‘Turbulence’ & ‘Good Luck, Kid (Knock on Wood)’

“Tell me this is just turbulence,” sings Kim Kylland, known onstage as simply Kylland. She appears in mourning — for life, for love, for our collective existence. A ghost in the attic. “I don’t know when we’ll be back again / Stranger in a strange land / I’m lost now without you,” she heaves, as though pushing a boulder up a mountain, Sisyphus-style. Her voice remains feathered, yet frayed. She agonizes over each syllable, and it all leads to the soul-crushing lamentation: “Oh, see you later / Oh, this is not the end.”

“Turbulence” is etched into our lives like an epitaph on a gravestone, cold and stunning. With an ongoing pandemic, now in its third year, there comes a deeper understanding about what it means to be alive. For Kylland and her husband Todd Schramke (also a director and producer), they have been in the trenches putting together a documentary for HBO called The Anarchists. So, their perspective is wildly different than most others. In her search for peace, she wrote songs, but she is still processing what’s been happening the last few years. “We never really stopped traveling or living our lives, and our flow of creating never slowed down. This also meant we were not as isolated as many people,” offers Kylland over email, “and I think that made a huge difference for us. Instead of watching the news, thinking of that as a representation of reality, we were out in the world having conversations and experiences with people. I strongly believe that fear is an immune system killer, so I strive to not live in that place.”

Death took on a new meaning, and it seemed to drape over our lives with a fragile eeriness. Many never quite experienced death’s sharp blade until now, but Kylland has already been met with tragedy. And it’s left a deep scar. “My relationship with death really crystallized when I was 21,” she says. Her best friend and then-frequent collaborator, musician, and songwriter Aimee Bystrom died in a devastating accident. “She was magnetic. Electric. She was one of those people who’d set fire to a room with her energy the minute she entered. Shortly after we both turned 21, Aimee passed away.”

“Her sudden death ripped the ground from under me and put into clear focus that today could be the last day you ever walk this earth. Aimee’s voice and guitar playing live contained some sort of magic,” she continues, “and I’ve often compared her sound to Jeff Buckley (another figure who died in the prime of his music writing/playing). Her life ending the way it did lit an extra hot fire under me to carry on and never take for granted that I was still breathing and singing.”

A tremendous shift occurred in the world, whether someone experienced a personal loss or knew someone who lost a loved one. Rippling effects can still be felt in our daily lives. A silver lining, though, is that this new-found reexamination of life and death has bestowed a greater appreciation for the here and now. In their search for meaning in all the chaos, Kylland and her husband packed up and moved across country, from California to Tennessee. “Our quality of life has changed immeasurably. Strangely, it’s refreshing to hear you bring up hard conversations, because I feel that we need them now more than ever,” she says. “I remember a time when people were allowed to have an opinion without it being blurred with who they were as a person. I’ve had a lot of hard conversations these past few years, as my various family and friend circles were incredibly divided over how to handle (or even talk about) the pandemic. Having hard conversations around this stuff taught me valuable lessons in patience and forgiveness, and they were a reminder that we can still love each other even if we don’t agree on big topics.”

With the other single, “Good Luck, Kid (Knock on Wood),” Kylland shines a light upon a woman named Lily Forrester, a pivotal player in the forthcoming The Anarchists documentary. Below, Kylland details where her muse led her, songwriting, and where these new songs fit into the scope of her debut album, expected in 2023.

The Anarchists is currently streaming on HBO Max.

With the sentiment of “Good Luck, Kid (Knock on Wood)”centering around Lily writing her own story, how has that idea played in your own story?

I definitely relate to the desire to write one’s own story. Most of my life I’ve been a self starter, and have always chosen to carve my own path. Growing up, I was a latchkey kid and an only child. I was partially raised by the MTV of the 90s that played music videos on a near continuous loop. From an early age, music and moving picture were incredibly intertwined for me, so often when I write songs it’s from a very visual place. In the case of ‘Good Luck, Kid (Knock on Wood),’ the visual element was deeply tied to the HBO documentary series that my husband and I spent 6 years making. With that as my hindsight, I think I was always meant to find a path to filmmaking, because it felt like a natural progression to blend music and documentary filmmaking in this way.

When I was 15, I dropped out of high school in order to travel the world playing music. I spent a few years living in Dublin, Ireland in the early 00s, and that really shaped me as a musician and performer. I made my living as a busker, constantly trying out new songs and playing music seven nights a week, rain or shine.

Throughout my teens and twenties I was a music teacher, a horseback riding instructor, a touring musician, and a jingle writer, among other things. Today, I co-own a production company with my husband. I’ve always been attracted to creative work, to lighting my own fire, so to speak. My early jobs all had one thing in common: it was entirely up to me to create the lessons, plans, motivate whomever I was working with, and figure out how to make a profit by doing it. I prefer to live a life that I can actively write and direct, and although it can sometimes mean that my life is more unpredictable, I enjoy the challenges and freedoms that come with being a creative and a business owner.

Having the type of freedom I had as a younger person was a double edged sword, because it required discipline, motivation, and hours of practice. I am thankful for that now, because it taught me self reliance and consistency. So much of success is just showing up everyday and doing the work. Motivating yourself can be hard, and I’ll say that today I am very fortunate to live and work with another highly creative individual.

At what point in making the documentary did you write these two songs?

I began writing ‘Good Luck, Kid (Knock on Wood)’ after a few extended trips to Acapulco and Morelia. These trips specifically focused on spending long hours interviewing Lily, and the more I learned about her life story, the more it played out in my mind like a narrative film, or a music video.

Sometimes in my writing process, I will write a chorus or a hook first, and this was the case with ‘Good Luck.’ I originally wrote this song on acoustic guitar, but quickly began playing it on piano, opening up the chord [vocals] a bit more which then informed some of the main vocal melody I came up with. This song was about 80 percent finished when I brought it to one of my longtime writing partners and dear friends Lila Oleszkiewicz.

Lila and I met in music school and immediately clicked. We both have a background firmly rooted in modal folk music, but somehow found ourselves at Mills College of Music, a school whose historic legacy was built around a genre often referred to as ‘new music.’ Dave Brubeck, Sofia Coppola, and Joanna Newsom can be counted among the alumni. Mills presented me with an open, create-it-yourself environment, and the opportunity to play, write, or record with other musicians almost daily. I was able to focus on composition and arranging music as it applied to my own songwriting and studio recording process. In one of the most life-changing classes I took while at Mills (film music composition with professor Fred Frith), I met Lila. It felt good to meet someone in that environment who didn’t take herself so seriously, who dealt with life’s sweetness and bitterness much the same way I did — in equal parts tears, laughter, and songwriting!

I’d spent a few weeks trying to finish ‘Good Luck, Kid’ on my own, but Lila really got it over the finish line. We spent an entire day workshopping this song at her studio, and by the end of the night, we both just knew it was done. Lila is an incredible pianist, and working with her always allows me to inhabit my voice fully and to get really creative as a singer. It’s an amazing feeling to work with someone who is complimentary to your own style but brings very different skills to the table and adds a different flavor. Lila’s knowledge and application of harmony is unmatched to anyone I’ve ever worked with. She turns my toplines into the most beautiful harmonic journeys. It’s one of my most cherished creative partnerships.

I began writing ‘Turbulence’ under very different circumstances. This one formed fast, almost pouring out of me. One morning during production of our doc series, we received what would turn out to be our last message from Nathan Freeman. The message was incoherent, and it startled us because although we’d been following the Freeman family for five years at that point, we weren’t aware of how bad things had gotten since we last filmed with them in 2020. Within an hour, we were on the phone with his wife Lisa who told us that Nathan was dying from cirrhosis of the liver. He was in the throes of the end stages and would most likely not live more than a few days.

We booked tickets to Mexico that night, determined to see Nathan one last time, to tell him that we’d just found out HBO wanted to help us turn all these years of filming into a six part series. As we were packing that night, I took a break to sit at my piano. I had a few chords that I’d been looping and trying to vocalize a melody over. I began playing those chords (what would become the intro you hear), and let my mind and voice wander. That morning I’d also seen a beautiful, heartbreaking post from Yoko Ono about a final trip she and John Lennon had taken to Japan, visiting one of their favorite cafes and riding bicycles in the crisp end of summer air. On the bike ride home, she suddenly remembered they’d accidentally left John’s favorite cigarette lighter behind. John’s carefree attitude was that they’d soon be back, not knowing it was the last time they’d ever visit that place together. The story she wove was so fragile, so visceral. The ordinariness of the lighter and the bike ride being looked back on with this new perspective was excruciating.

This story was the basis for the opening lyrics in [this song]: ‘The light outside is growing dim, I don’t know, when we’ll be back again.’ Yoko’s story felt so tied to the pain I felt in Lisa. The two stories almost blurred together in my mind in the rush of packing and crying and piano playing. The chorus and end refrain ‘tell me this is just turbulence’ is something that I sung into a voice memo on my phone, on the flight to Mexico.

Strangely, I think this song ended up being somewhat autobiographical for me. My father, who was (like Nathan) a charming, brilliant person, and a life-long heavy drinker, succumbed to severe cirrhosis of the liver in 2013. It’s a loop I know all too well: trying to save someone, but not being able to break their bond to the bottle. Losing someone you love to addiction is a special kind of agony because it feels so unnecessary, and I felt the pain of Lisa and the Freeman’s three children so deeply during the period we spent with them just after Nathan’s passing.

The final recording of ‘Turbulence’ that you hear envelops you in feelings of weightlessness, suspension, floating. We ended up keeping the vocals I laid down during the demo process because they felt so raw. I wanted this song to capture that out of body experience one has immediately following the passing of a close beloved, when you are left with someone’s ghost, with a dimming light, with a refrain, begging God to wake you up from a nightmare, asking to please let this rocky patch turn out to only be turbulence, and not the real thing. It’s a story close to my heart, and perhaps why the song poured out of me so quickly.

Another central aspect of the song comes down to wanting to do things differently than one’s parents. Are there things you had to confront and discard to make a healthier way forward?

I believe we all have things we inherited from our parents that we’d rather not have. It’s a struggle for everyone that I’ve met, honestly. Life is complicated and unpredictable, and all families inevitably have their own tragedies, bad habits, and neuroses. Critical thinking about why we develop and stay stuck in inherited patterns is crucial to creating a peaceful, more successful life. Cognitive behavioral therapy is something that’s been helping me recently in finding out why I react the way I do, and how I can create new patterns and pathways in my mind to react differently next time.

Musically, the “ooo” chants and background vocals in “Turbulence” supply a real haunted texture to the song. How did this develop in writing and recording?

This developed naturally with Lila. For me, singing and harmonizing really shines when I get work with another great, expressive vocalist. This is definitely an area where Lila and I click, and I am hoping to do the vocal arrangements on my album with her. Honestly, the majority of my writing sessions with Lila are spent harmonizing, and it’s so fun.

What I appreciate most musically in the song is the steady rhythmic section punctuating the words and gliding melody. Did it always take this form?

On both [these songs], the punchiness of the rhythm was something that came through playing these songs a lot on electric guitar while Todd was on drums. The original demos of both of these songs had a more piano-driven, floaty vibe, and once Todd and I started playing them together in our home studio, they took on a more rock feeling, and the punchiness developed a bit more.

Though we ultimately had a different drummer play on the recordings you hear today, Todd played bass and produced the tracks alongside our engineer/producer Brad Dollar. Lila added her harmonic magic. The string swells you hear in ‘Turbulence’ were tracked by a dear friend and former bandmate named Corey Mike. The rhythm Todd and I developed together was something we all leaned into in the final recordings, especially once we had the silky grooviness laid down by drummer Peter Labberton.

In all, what did you learn from making this documentary, now an HBO series? About yourself and the world?

I learned that no matter where you come from, what language you speak, what ideology you subscribe to, we all want the same things: purpose, human connection, good health, freedom, and a way to make a living. Even though we are united by these common threads, it’s so easy to get bogged down by our emotions and end up not being able to see the forest for the trees. I think that’s a mistake a lot of people make, concentrating on our differences rather than how much we have in common. I think we just have to do our best to see the humanity in everyone, especially the ones you don’t agree with. Doing so keeps you sharp and empathetic. It was Abraham Lincoln who said ‘I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better..’ That’s a principle I try to live by. Talk to everyone. Be unoffendable. I’m not perfect though, and I have the same struggles to see clearly, to think with my rational brain and not my lizard brain. The occasional dose of psilocybin helps with this, as it’s a way to break down your ego, and slow down the rush of judgements we all tend to have about one another.

The documentary we made is ultimately something I am very proud of. It’s not an explainer on anarchy (or any other ideology), but rather a case study in how ideologies can often be a temporary solace for people who are searching for some greater meaning or peace. ‘The Anarchists’ is a complex human tale that touches on the timeless struggles of searching for freedom, searching for community, and how those two searches can often conflict. It also highlights how these journeys often lead us back to ourselves, finding that our greatest conflicts are actually with ourselves, and not the external world. One of my favorite sayings is ‘wherever you go, there you are.’ I think that was a theme for many of the characters in our show, who all ultimately find that the work they did on themselves became more valuable than any ‘movement’ or abstract dogma they tried to follow.

What about these songs fit together as a double single release?

We felt like these two songs lived in the same world. They were both written during the making of the biggest, most all-consuming project of my life with Todd. They also focused on two very strong women who star in our series. Lily and Lisa couldn’t be more different in many ways, but they both share strong traits of strength and determination. These two were handed impossible situations by life, but they endeavored to turn shit into gold. Lisa and Lily have both risen from the ashes of their past and are now living a life totally of their own creation — Lisa as a professional bodybuilder, trainer, and nutritionist, and Lily as an accomplished aerial silks performer, writer, and textile artist. I think sonically these two songs do venture into melancholy territory, but they ultimately feel rooted in unwavering strength and a passion for life.

How do these two tracks fit into the album?

I am glad you brought this up! I’m excited to say that these two singles will be on my debut album. All the songs on my forthcoming album are full of my vocal harmonies and unique guitar stylings, so I think that gives them a distinct feel, sonically speaking. A few things listeners can expect on this album are warm guitars, lush vocal harmonies, and honest lyrics. My aim is to make an album that will make you laugh, cry, and dance.

What themes do many of the other songs on your forthcoming album explore?

The themes on my album are an amalgamation of my life so far: loss, joy, struggle, excess, burning the candle at both ends… I have a few more songs on this album that were inspired by our doc series, and one in particular that was deeply inspired by the city of Acapulco, Mexico where we spent the majority of our time filming. There are also a few songs that I wrote and recorded a few years ago, just before our documentary took on full-time priority. We toured those songs and had a great response from our audiences, and I’m thrilled to breathe new life into them for this full length.

The songs on this album are my best work to date, songs in which I’ve been able to feel my most free and powerful as a vocalist, and I can’t wait to get out and perform these songs for live audiences.

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