MALL AMERICAN GIRL Interview With the Amythyst Kiah

MALL AMERICAN GIRL Interview With the Amythyst Kiah

Zachary Lipez

"When people ask me what I do, I say, ‘Oh, I’m a singer-songwriter, I do Americana music.’ And then I break it down to kind of explain that this is just American music, essentially.”

And Amythyst Kiah has been exploring the wild definitions of Americana for more than a decade. In 2020, “Black Myself,” a song Kiah wrote as a member of Our Native Daughters, was nominated for a Grammy

for Best American Roots Song. The irreproachable folk label Rounder released Kiah’s album Wary + Strange in 2021 and will release her third full-length, Still + Bright, in October. The upcoming album, in its choices of producer (Butch Walker, whose CV includes Taylor Swift and Green Day), themes (sci-fi, Eastern philosophy), collaborators (Billy Strings and Rancid’s Tim Armstrong), and sounds (mandolins, garage guitars), makes clear that any category of country that Amythyst Kiah finds herself in is going to have the kind of open borders that make a certain kind of purist wet their white sheet diaper.

“It’s the catchall for people who don’t fit into any of the other...” she laughs, obscuring the end of the sentence. Modes? Waves? It doesn’t matter. “I was never really part of any scene, per se. I was always interested in just, like, having a good time with people.”

Not fitting in but still having fun is a recurring concern on Still + Bright. Multiple songs are inspired, via both memory and a well-maintained journal, by Kiah’s years as a self-described “mall goth.” Pre-adolescence Kiah had been a reasonably regular (if anxiety-prone) suburban gal, raised on Afro-Cuban jazz and Enya, playing sports at the YMCA, and learning to play guitar. Pretty much a G-rated version of “Free Failin'.” But as is always the case (be it Tom Petty’s depiction of onset adulthood or the universality of puberty), eventually there were vampires.

“Looking back, I probably would have been called a poser back in the day,” she says. “I got introduced to anime in high school. What got me into it is, I was obsessed with vampires at the time. I was reading Anne Rice. I watched every vampire movie, even the ones that aged horribly. And so someone told me about Vampire Hunter D and I remember being like, ‘Holy shit.’ I had no idea, because all I knew about anime was Pikachu.”

But few undead explicitly appear in the songs. The Billy Strings collaboration “Silk and Petals” is about a literal ghost but, with lines like “I don’t feel myself at all/Is there a ghost in me, or just a love song,” it’s also about the mysticism of pain. Above all, Still + Bright is as much about empathy as it is about memory. Songs like “Play God and Destroy the World” (the cow-goth strut opener that plausibly could’ve been indebted to Concrete Blonde’s “Bloodletting” if anyone under the age of 45 listened to Concrete Blonde) were inspired by childhood notebooks and adolescent ponderings related to The Matrix.

The title of Kiah’s newest is partially derived from a translation of Lau Tzu’s Tao Te Ching where, in chapter 58, the philosopher describes a sage as ideally attaining a state of being “bright, but does not dazzle.” Translations vary, but—after some time in her career spent exploring the more glam aspects of

showbiz—that’s the lesson that resonated with Kiah. Throughout our interview, she is hyperaware of her choice of words, allowing herself long pauses so she can say what she intends. And still doubling back with caveats when, for instance, her expressing discomfort with the glam way she used to dress might be misinterpreted as her putting down those who happen to like a bit of rhinestone on their Nudie suit. “I understand that there are people who, for them, this is a performance. And then the they ever two can they’re things. go back doing But to and that’s doing separate just whatnot the creative path that I have found myself on,” says Kiah. She coulda gone with another interpretation of the Lao Tzu text as “radiant, but easy on the eyes.” But that would have been a different album.

It's tempting to strain a line between an anime-goth adolescence and a fully realized adult artist’s sense of radical acceptance, even if Hot Topic T-shirts tend to hew closer to the Buddhist “the nature of existence is suffering" ethos than they do any tenets of Taoism.

“The part of the healing that I’ve accepted is that the things that now come up, no matter how far back they are...” Kiah explains as our talk nears its end, “if it’s a recurring thought, it’s worth exploring.... The ability to be able to look back on something and be able to write about it, and not go immediately back to that place, is worthwhile.”

Likewise, the medium in which Amythyst Kiah interrogates the past and present is a question of translation too. Calling it “just American music, essentially,” rings hard and true, with the prosaic “just” and cosmic “essentially” again implying balance, while rendering the work of a thousand roots-music theorists moot.

“If something’s good, it’s good. If it strikes me, it strikes me, and then I’ll figure out what it is about it that strikes me, because I think that’s interesting. But the common thread is, it’s one of those things where it hits you in the gut. You don’t have to think about it. You just feel it. I say that from a very specific music perspective, which is: I’m a critical listener, but I also enjoy listening to trash. All of it has a place,” the singer says, echoing the Zen of Jimmie Dale Gilmore as much as Lao Tzu.

“So yeah, just have fun,” Kiah adds. Again, laughing. “Try to, anyway.”