Three years ago, singer-songwriter Sarah Kinsley posted a TikTok video titled “women don’t produce music”.
In it, she is seen tapping everyday objects like tables and wine glasses, pounding her fist into a bed, opening a door handle and recording vocals inside a makeshift home studio. What results from all of that is an ethereal pop anthem. That TikTok video soon went viral, and has since been viewed more than 4.5 million times.
“Me saying that in that video a few years ago was kind of satirical, because women do produce music. People just don’t recognize them for it,” Kinsley said in an interview with RepresentASIAN Project from her New York apartment, having just finished her headlining North American The Escaper tour.
“It becomes this weird cycle of going, ‘Oh, women don’t produce music because I don’t know anyone.’ And it then translates into women can’t produce music. I think that thread of logic has definitely made its way into the music landscape.”
That lack of recognition for female producing musicians is part of why Kinsley handles the production of her songs with such care. The irony of asking her what it’s like to be a female producer in 2024 is also not lost. After all, another video Kinsley posted on Tiktok pokes fun at journalists asking her, “What is it like being a female producer?”
Jokes aside, Kinsley, 24, says she is grateful for the attention and excited to talk about production and the other female musicians she admires.
“There’s not a lot of recognition of the female genius and the female mind.”
While quite some time has passed since Kinsley first posted her “women don’t produce music” video, her career has taken off in big ways in 2024.
On September 6, she released her debut studio album Escaper and followed that with a headline tour that saw her sell out venues in cities like Toronto, New York and Los Angeles.
“I’m still very floored by it,” Kinsley said about her touring experience.
“I think that live music is the best way to experience any kind of music listening. It’s very spiritual to have all these people in a room.”
Born in Mountain View, California and raised in Connecticut, Kinsley grew up as a classically trained musician.
“It was a very classic, Chinese-American upbringing,” she said. “I was like three or four, so I didn’t really have a choice.”
Despite this, Kinsley found that she really loved playing the piano and grew up playing in orchestras. As she got older, she learned the violin and the cello. Eventually, she started playing the guitar.
While classical music was the foundation of Kinsley’s musical talents, her interest in pop music was sparked after her family moved to Singapore for five years when she was a teenager. While there, she’d listen to Top 40 music, at a time when Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift were topping the charts. Over time, Kinsley started moving away from her classical music roots.
“It was really competitive,” she said of playing in orchestras.
“I feel like that was happening at the same time that I was starting to kind of hate classical music sometimes, and have a real anger towards it. The radio was really sparkly and clean and exciting.”
As a student at Columbia University, Kinsley studied music theory, but it was there that she started experimenting with making alternative pop music. Though when COVID-19 closed borders and had the majority of the world isolating at home, Kinsley started crafting even more songs inside her New York apartment and took music-making more seriously.
On June 4, 2021, she released the extended play The King. The title track of the same name, went viral on TikTok, particularly for the epic piano arrangement that plays right at the beginning. The track then builds into a powerful alt-pop-rock song that explores Kinsley’s thoughts around coming of age.
It’s cathartic to listen to, and even more powerful in a room sung with an audience. Kinsley builds on her knack for honest storytelling and anthemic music in her latest album Escaper, which explores themes around grief following the death of a close friend and her experience going through a “horrible friendship breakup.”
Putting those intense emotions into songs was a form of escapism for Kinsley, who ended up writing textured and otherworldly tracks full of synths and pounding drums in songs like “Last Time We Never Meet Again”, “Glint” and “Realms.”
“Grief as a concept is something we kind of face all the time. We just don’t really give it a name or label this thing,” she said.
“I just think loss in general is a thing that we are constantly going through, but the big pangs of loss and real tragedy, those things pierce the veil of what grief actually is. It felt very necessary for me to write about it as a way to move through it.”
There’s also a lot of affection and love in Escaper too, as heard in the track “Starling.” Before introducing the song during her concert in Toronto, Kinsley told the audience it’s about celebrating platonic love and being in awe of your best friends.
“Especially after all this grief and loss, you just return to a sense of wanting to preserve things forever. When you go through that kind of thing, you feel like there’s nothing as important as cementing the people you love into the art you make,” Kinsley said.
“I was just at dinner with two of my closest friends, having a moment where I wasn’t speaking for a while just staring at them and thinking, ‘I just fucking love you guys so much!’”
As an artist who primarily writes and produces in her bedroom closet, Kinsley experimented with unique instruments, including glass bowls and a contact microphone, an instrument that records sounds from vibrating solid materials instead of the air.
Many have compared Kinsley’s work to the likes of Maggie Rogers, HAIM and Mitski (the latter who she has opened for on tour). These are all artists Kinsley says she has great admiration and respect for. She adds that she is also aware of the fact that there still aren’t that many self-producing female musicians who are Asian American like her. But at the same time, is conscious of others putting her in a box.
“I hope to be a part of a growing group of artists who are focusing on creating their own sounds themselves and looking inward and using different instruments and weird sounds and bizarre methods to get somewhere. I would really be honoured to be part of that,” she said.
This past November, Kinsley reached another milestone of performing on TV for the first time on The Kelly Clarkson Show. While much of her music-making journey has been experienced in solitude, she says she’s hopeful to spread the joy of her songs together with fans through her concerts.
“The way that people engage with the music live adds another dimension to music-making that I haven’t had, especially because I started really during the pandemic at a time of pure isolation,” she said.
“It’s all that I dreamed of when I was in college and thinking about being a musician.”
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