The Music Enjoyer with Kiko Soirée

Welcome back to the series "The Music Enjoyer," in which I ask music-oriented people for a bit of their musical DNA — the music they listened to when they were younger, the music they listen to now — and also for some practical info, like their favorite ways to find music and actually listen to it.

Extremely special guest today: Kiko Soirée. They're a drag artist and performer based in Brooklyn, a co-host of the spirituality-themed podcast Savior Complex, and creator of the show Dear Kiko, an advice show that combines improv comedy, audience interactivity and live music in a truly magical way that you really have to see to believe (it's leaving NYC for the first time and coming to Los Angeles—specifically Dynasty Typewriter—this Thursday 10/3).

I met Kiko in college! We were classmates and began school together in 2008 amid a whirling tornado of thrifted plaid shirts, plastic Crystal Palace vodka bottles, and melodic indie-pop music. When I asked them to do this interview, it was originally going to be over email, but Kiko suggested a zoom instead, which turned out to be 100% the right call as it let us vibe on our mutual experience of Peak Turn-of-the-'10s Indie in a much more holistic way. We talked about emo phases, hipster group identity, playing music to feel like you're in a movie, ice cream shop playlist curation, and wishing on your birthday for Sufjan Stevens to be gay. Below, our lightly edited conversation, complete with various links and videos so you can follow along with this musical journey.

How has performance stuff been going for you?

Really good. Post-pandemic, I've become a lot more intentional about what I say yes to, and what I commit my energy to. And that was a big shift. Before the pandemic, I was saying yes to everything. I was like, Let's see how much I can do in a single year. And now I'm like, Noooo. I'm committing myself to either my own stuff that's a bigger production, or just things I really want to do.

Totally fair. Okay, want to talk about music?

Okay yeah, I just pulled up your questions.

Let's talk about music you listened to when you were a kid.

So I'm going to give you a specific memory. One of my first experiences with music was church songs. Our church was Chinese Bible Church of Greater Boston. I always say it was like the Korean Church in Gilmore Girls, but not so strict. Actually, a lot of my life felt like I was living in Gilmore Girls because I grew up in a very colonial northeast town—Lexington, "the birthplace of the American Revolution." The younger, English service had the cool music. A lot of these more contemporary Christian worship songs...like when Hillsong really started to blow up and I was reading about it, I was like, Yeah, I know all those songs. They say pop songs and Christian songs are the same, you just replace "Jesus" with "baby." And it's so true. That's where I started to understand music and chord progressions and things like that. That's one element that I can't not talk about, even though I have a weird relationship with religion, duh.

There are other really distinct memories that come to mind...we got the Ricky Martin CD and the Aqua CD in a bin at Costco. Those two CDs, I remember we were eating dinner, and I wanted to play those CDs while we were eating dinner. And my parents were just like, Why? Aqua was so addicting. "Barbie Girl" is everything.

Another core memory was listening to Britney Spears' debut album at summer camp. The counselors were playing it on repeat, and we would sit around the speaker and just, like, hold the case open, and read those pieces of paper.

My parents also grew up playing '60s and '70s singer-songwriters around the house, and on road trips we listened to a lot of Beatles, the Carpenters...also Elaine Paige's greatest hits, randomly. It was a weird mosaic of music.

Do you remember buying your own CDs?

Not as a kid. In terms of choosing my own music, I think that went hand-in-hand with being a teen, and mp3 players [ed. note, my transcription originally wrote "mp3 players" as "empathy players" hehe]. I had a Rio. I loved Winamp. I loved making my little playlists. We were always sharing music on AIM, it was always very social in that way. That was when I first started to really discover music.

My first real concert was My Chemical Romance, from when they put out Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge. I didn't seem like it on the outside but I was definitely an emo kid in my heart, my bleeding heart.

Do you remember how you found out about the emo lifestyle?

It was a slow gradation. I feel like first I got really into Guster. Do you know Guster?

Oh yeah!

I was really into Guster, and things started to evolve. It must have been the My Chemical Romance "Helena" music video, and the "I'm Not Okay" one. I was like, I don't know what this is all about, but I'm into it. Obviously I was in my closet, but I was like, they are confirming that I'm different...and so are they! [laughing] I had some key friends who were also emo, and listening to different kinds of music. Burning CDs for everything, people making you mixes, writing on them in Sharpie.

The emo phase was fun. And then everything that branches off from that: pop punk, bands like Mae and Sugarcult. Obviously Fall Out Boy was huge, right? There were people who only knew the hits, and I was like...I know Take This To Your Grave. I loved anything that was like catchy, and I had a wide net. I loved The All-American Rejects. Who couldn't love "Swing Swing" and "Move Along"?

The screamo-est I ever got was maybe Underoath. And I didn't go past there. I was never into metal. It didn't have any femme to it.

Wow, that really puts in perspective my own taste in alternative music. When I was pushing the boundaries of what my taste was, there was a certain level of screamo that wasn't for me anymore, and that's probably because there wasn't any femme in it.

And I had this current of dealing with religion and faith, so I also really loved Christian rock. Oh my gosh, now I'm remembering Anberlin. I bought that CD from FYE. And what was that band that was kind of sugary...[singing] sunny with a high of 75...ohh, Reliant K.

And you would know people who were like, "Oh you like Reliant K? You're going to like Jack's Mannequin." That was the fun aspect before the algorithm, is that music listening was highly social, in that way where you were always like talking about, "If you like this, you might like that."

Totally. Do you remember coming to a point where you rejected the emo phase, or did you carry that with you without embarrassment for the person that you used to be?

That's a great question. Obviously there's shame, always [laughing]. But when you meet someone who was an emo kid, it's like we understand something, you know? And it was a special moment in history where it might not happen again in that way. It was so genuine. And we were teenagers, so it was a perfect marketing and culture moment.

I think something changed when I started working at this ice cream store in my town at the end of junior year. It was a cool place to have a job. And I say that having come from maybe the uncoolest job, which was working at Panera. A part of the interview for the ice cream shop—which I totally got the job because of nepotism, because my sister worked there, and was dating the best friend of the son of the owner of the ice cream shop—

—That's approved nepotism. I mean, we gotta draw the line somewhere.

But I applied and I got an interview, and one of their questions was "What kind of music do you listen to?" That's one memory where I was like, okay, someone's asking me what kind of music I like, and they're going to judge me. I was into Radiohead then, so I was like, Radiohead is a cool band, people think they're kind of smart. And then I can say I love All-American Rejects, because you want to also sound relatable. That's when I started to think that...what you tell people is a curation of how they're viewing you, right? It's a perception.

The reason why I bring it up is that it was actually a cool place where people would make mixes and leave them on the shelf next to the CD player, and play those mixes. That really opened my music world up. And you would hear things like, "Oh yeah, it's really fun to work on shift with that person. They play good music."

That is really interesting. The curation aspect reminds me of when I went off to college, and there was the music section of your Facebook profile, back when people cared about Facebook profiles. And I remember trying to figure out the right combination of cool and relatable bands.

This is where I was like, well, we should just talk in person because I feel like we should share this experience. The next big music expansion really was college. We met totally different kinds of people, but also Skidmore was a small liberal arts school with, like, hipster culture. And I feel like, again, it's sort of embarrassing, but also kind of fun to be like, Yeah, actually I went to college in the full hipster era. Grizzly Bear, Vampire Weekend, Dr. Dog.

I loved being part of this group identity. And it went hand in hand with exploring intellectually different things that we liked, and trying on identity. The Books, "The Lemon of Pink," this one song I would listen to over and over again when I was in the art studio. Animal Collective...and also stupid stuff like Taio Cruz.

So much music in that time, really, it felt like I was in a movie. Very cinematic. That has always been my favorite part about music, when it feels like, this song is narrating my life right now. Even for just three minutes, right? I remember one time walking home on campus back to my apartment late at night, I was working in the studio and it had just started snowing, and a song from Band Of Horses came on on my phone, and it was "Is There A Ghost? Those are the core memories that I love to revisit. It was emotional. It was full throttle. But then it was also soft and poetic too. Ah, Band Of Horses.

I love hearing this era being spoken about in this way, because I do feel like people get very irony-poisoned about that particular time of indie music...and, like, why? It was good!

And Lady Gaga came out when we were in college. The "Bad Romance" video, I was like...yeah, I'm definitely gay. I was rewatching it with a group of queer friends. We were all just watching it in silence. She really started something.

Oh, and total non sequitur—Taking Back Sunday. I just have to say that for the record, I loved that that band. I have a whole playlist called Teenager: No Doubt, Red Hot Chili Peppers.

The Taking Back Sunday thing makes me wonder, do you have an affinity for interesting vocalists?

I think it does kind of go back to being exposed to so many '60s and '70s singer-songwriters, is that my first imprint of vocalists were always people who made songs their own. And I think that's what fits so well about emo music or pop punk music, is that they're—almost cloyingly—making it their own, right? To the point that it can become a trope.

But I think of someone like Sufjan Stevens, who for me has just stood the test of time. And I also have to say on the record, can we believe that he's finally out? I mean, we all knew, but we didn't know. I used to joke-wish on my birthday, I just want to know if Sufjan Stevens is gay. But for vocalists, I've always appreciated a unique voice that maybe doesn't have the same power or technicality as someone who is on Broadway, but really makes music their own. And Sufjan has a range of maybe seven notes, he's not out here trying to be crazy and doing acrobatics, but he has continued to make music that's been completely his own style.

Lykke Li is another one of those people. I do have a huge soft spot for softly sung folk music.

Oh, man, I haven't thought about Lykke Li in a minute.

She had an album that really flew under the radar called Eyeye. It's so sad, and it does sound like she's in an aquarium for 33 minutes. But it's beautiful if you want to feel devastated.

Yeah, I do, pretty much always. So what is your musical diet these days, and how are you finding new music?

This is where the whole premise of your blog really comes into focus, because the advent of the algorithm and things being suggested to you really shapes things.I sometimes miss the closer-knit environments that were natural locuses of sharing music, or even experimenting with identity. If I'm writing the essay in real time, it would be like: the ice cream shop really was a place where music was shared. That was a node. And college really was a node. And then we're in the city and it's a whole new landscape.

I'm involved in nightlife and in entertainment spaces, and hearing different music there. My ears are always up if I really like something. That's been a really fun and dorky thing, Shazam.

I love Shazam.

With people recycling so many genres and stuff, I'm in the phase of my life where I'm like, well, what am I gravitating towards? And it's like a whole mishmash. It's like, K-Pop...parts of the Beyoncé album...some random electronic artists with only 5000 listeners. Do you know Duskus?

Later in life I've gotten into house music with no words...A.G. Cook without vocals, I guess. Tycho, that's something I would not have listened to when I was younger. I love wordless music. I listen to frequency music, just tones, for hours! Truly, it's like I'm taking a sound bath. I haven't thought about writing music for years, but now just for fun, I've started experimenting on my own with writing frequency music.

And I don't know how deeply you are interested in astrology, but my Mercury is in Virgo, so I'm kind of compulsive, and for my music listening, I've made a different playlist for every single season of my age since I was 20. Now I'm on Spring 33.

That's incredible.

With how my music taste has developed—the way I hear about music has now been decentralized. A lot of times, friends send me a link to something and I check it out. A lot of it is social media. And especially for like big things, like—did you hear the new Taylor Swift album?—I'll always check out the big albums, because I want to know what it's all about, and see what songs I'm drawn to.

I have two music personalities: one is really introspective and folksy and quiet, and the other is upbeat and explosive. Also randomly now, old country songs like "I Hope You Dance." I started going line dancing. I'm on the spectrum between Kacey Musgraves and and Charli XCX.

Thank you Kiko! See them in L.A. on 10/3, and follow them on Instagram.

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