The first time Hayley Kiyoko carried out on a two-foot-wide stage, she was enjoying at a mall in Oregon for 5 folks. It was round 2013 and he or she was selling certainly one of her earliest data, A Belle to Remember. The night time earlier than Kiyoko speaks with SPIN, nonetheless, was notably the primary time since then that she had performed a gig on a stage that small—and it occurred to be her most memorable one but—the first-ever Pride efficiency at Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence the place rainbow balloons, streamers and lights adorned the house. “It was just a casual pool party at the vice president’s residence,” the singer quips over Zoom, tucking a strand of her mild blonde bob behind her ears.
Kiyoko has come a great distance from that mall gig in Oregon. Since the discharge of Kiyoko’s 2018 debut album, Expectations, the singer has earned a rabid fanbase that christened her as “Lesbian Jesus.” Along the best way, she even carried out with Taylor Swift stay onstage and earned a spot within the singer’s music video for “You Need to Calm Down.” But throughout the peak of her success, the pop star was struggling. After hitting her head at a Real World/Road Rules birthday celebration in 2016, she discovered herself battling post-concussion syndrome and melancholy, amongst different well being points that had hindered her every day life. While Kiyoko might simply go into “a four-hour deep dive” concerning the aftermath of her concussion, the condensed model is that she ended up on a lot medicine—a gallon-size Ziploc bag of them, to be exact—that she was getting unwanted effects that might solely be alleviated with extra medicine.
“I was in a rabbit hole of not figuring out what was wrong with me and had all of these emotions covering up what the root of the issue was, but it’s it’s really hard when people have health issues because the health system is really challenging,” she says. “There’s not a lot of support, and everyone’s just guessing.”
Though she was already within the technique of making an attempt to heal her physique, when the pandemic hit in early 2020, Kiyoko was largely compelled to concentrate on her well being—one thing she hadn’t absolutely devoted the time to do beforehand. “I feel like life gets so crazy, and it’s hard to take care of yourself. It’s hard to do things for you and make that a priority. So I was very grateful to be forced to do that in that time,” she explains. During that point, she found that the majority of her points had been attributable to irritation. “I started healing myself with food, and it’s changed my life,” she smiles.
But throughout that point, Kiyoko was engaged on a stable chunk of what would turn out to be her sophomore document, Panorama. The maximalist first single from the album— “Found My Friends”— honored how self-reliant Kiyoko had discovered to turn out to be all through her well being points. It wasn’t one thing mates might essentially assist with. But after quite a lot of work on her personal— studying, numerous physician appointments and a change to an anti-inflammatory food regimen—that Ziploc bag of drugs is gone. “Friends can’t fix your problems,” the singer says of the tune’s that means. “You have to fix your problems yourself.” That, too, was therapeutic.
While Kiyoko wrote Expectations and launched it quickly after, she had quite a lot of time to sit down along with her subsequent LP—roughly a yr and a half. Before she ever shared it with others, Kiyoko was in a position to develop a powerful bond along with her newest launch. “It’s been an interesting process because the album has really been a support and comfort to me throughout the last year—and I didn’t really get to have that experience with my first album,” she says.
Kiyoko considers Panorama to be “a more refined version” of who she is. “I was, on a personal level, basically being broken down and having to put myself back together with my health issues,” she explains. “And I think that paralleled my music where I was breaking things down and kind of ‘spring cleaning.’”
Along the best way, Kiyoko wanted some assist to ship a cohesive message as she was rebuilding, so she enlisted Danja (Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake) as an government producer. Together, Danja and Kiyoko’s visions aligned. The pop singer recollects she watched a handful of high-stakes motion motion pictures with the producer, who additionally calls himself Bruce Wayne.
“He’s obsessed with Batman, and I’m obsessed with hope,” she says. “I wanted to have this visual yearning of hope, but also this energy and adventure to it.” For her, “high stakes” was a throughline. “Every lyric, every melody, everything that you hear sonically was actively decided,” she recollects. “Everything was intentional.”
One of essentially the most intentional components of Panorama got here with the discharge of the album’s third single “For the Girls,” one of many first ladies empowerment anthems the singer has ever launched. The cheeky, summer season bop turned half of a bigger cultural dialog when Kiyoko launched its music video in late May. Kiyoko not solely created her personal three-minute model of the ABC actuality present The Bachelorette, however had a headline-making reveal on the finish of the visible—she was courting Becca Tilley, a contestant on Season 19 of The Bachelor and had been for 4 years.
The music video was multi-pronged: it paid tribute to Tilley’s time on the present, and to Kiyoko’s love of actuality TV and courting exhibits. “We watch The Bachelor every Monday night,” she notes.” Directed by Kiyoko, the music video was really solid and shot like a actuality TV present. Kiyoko solid 15 queer contestants and met with them over Zoom to get to know them earlier than deciding what their personas can be. During filming, everybody had a cheat sheet guiding them via the drama—whether or not they’d steal a rose or be a villain. The better part? “No one knew who was playing who,” Kiyoko exclaims. “So it really felt like a reality show.” Kiyoko has all the time wished to be “The Bachelor,” so it was a dream come true. “I literally could have shot like a full season with these contestants,” she admits.
Kiyoko, nonetheless, doesn’t ignore the darker moments of the previous few years on Panorama however she does douse them in a glittery sheen. The catchy dance-pop lower “S.O.S.”—or “same old shit”—was impressed by a second that prompted Kiyoko to begin remedy. “[It’s about] having this head-to-head moment where you’ve tried everything to keep this relationship going, and each person has both tried everything and it’s like, ‘Is it too late to try to save this or is [a breakup] inevitable?’” she says of the observe. The identical goes for “Flicker Start,” which was impressed by a time pre-pandemic when Kiyoko was extraordinarily depressed, in tears and wanted to flee. But she opted for a shiny synth-pop ode to hope as an alternative of one thing extra maudlin.
That sense of hope is what propels Kiyoko—it’s what drives her. Despite what she’s been via, she’s by no means overlooked her targets. “I want to be a mainstream pop star, direct movies and television shows and continue to be a storyteller,” she explains. Along the best way, she additionally needs to make some new mates by collaborating with some very particular artists. “I love Harry Styles. I feel like Harry and Hayley is definitely a moment that needs to happen. I love Dua Lipa, a little choreographed moment would be lovely. I’d love to get Missy Elliott on a track,” she reveals. But regardless of who Kiyoko works or what she does, she’s going to all the time have one explicit purpose in thoughts: “To normalize queer artists and inspire hope.” Amen, Lesbian Jesus.
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