The best art moves the heart and spirit of the audience. For creators of music, making their listeners think, feel and even move is their purpose. The more revelatory, authentically honest, and vulnerable the songwriter makes themselves, the deeper the connection to their audience, and the more potent, more inspirational and more soul-changing the experience.
While able to craft incessantly delightful pop music, Toronto’s Kayla Diamond infuses her melodious compositions with searing honesty, profound depth – to paraphrase Janis Joplin, she gives you another little piece of her heart with every word and every note.
This is demonstrated to stunning effect on her new EP, Dirty Laundry, a collection of songs that is as vibrant and enlivening as it is an unfiltered and resonant examination of her pain, confusion, longing, and ultimately, her resilience after enduring the hard knocks of a relationship gone bad.
Yes, it could be classified as a breakup album, but it is so much more – as is Diamond herself.
The scintillating performances and eminently memorable, darkly sweet pop-oriented songs that Diamond has crafted are indeed a bold, adventurous, deeply personally and provocative, but ultimately satisfying experience for her as the creator, as well as for the listener. It is a compelling and riveting listen, and one that is as immersive emotionally as it is a great jam.
Remarkably, if not for one sympathetic academic administrator, we may never had heard the charming strength of Diamond’s music at all, as she was headed towards a law degree before the muse really took hold of her soul and spirit a few short years ago. Her narrative thusly takes a sharp 90 degree turn into a powerfully inspiring story of following one’s dreams.
“I had no intention of being a professional musician. I didn’t think I could be because I didn’t think I was good enough. I knew I could play an instrument and could sing a bit, but, whatever. I still loved music, and the summer between finishing my undergrad degree and starting law school I had some spare time and recorded the single Crazy and just put it out on YouTube as kind of a hobby thing. I moved to Windsor and was going to law school in Detroit, crossing the border every day and someone sent me a link to this contest called It’s Your Shot, put on by Slaight Music. I figured, what the hell, and submitted the YouTube video. And that was in August of 2015. Five or six months later, after my last exam of first semester, I got a call from Slaight Music saying that I had won a recording deal, and that they had this whole plan set up to record an EP and a radio single and all this other stuff,” she explained from her home in Toronto.
“They asked me if I would be interested in leaving law school and coming back to Toronto to record. I said, ‘are you crazy? That’s the most irresponsible thing I have ever been asked to do, so no.’ They offered to get me a Via Rail pass and I would come in every weekend and have a writing session. I said okay, because it was very hard to go to law school and not have a mental break on the weekend. I had a meeting with them over the winter break in 2016 and the first day back after the break, when I was siting in Property Law class I looked up at the board and it’s the rule of perpetuity and all this legal mumbo jumbo and all I could think about was the song that I was going to write with all this studio time I had.
“I got up and walked out of the room, which is something you don’t do in a law school class and I went into the dean’s office and said to her, ‘look, I am very conflicted because I got a record deal and all I can think about is music. I don’t want that to take away from my legal studies, so I don’t know what to do.’ She looked at me and said, ‘I am going to tell you something. When I was your age, I had the opportunity to sign with the New York City Ballet and I chose not to do it, and I think about that decision every day for the past 20 years. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. I think you should take the opportunity and come back to law school if it doesn’t work out.’ I replied, ‘can you call my Orthodox Jewish parents and convince them?’ And she actually did! She got on a conference call with my parents and said, ‘your daughter needs to do this because this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and law school will always be here.’ I drove home from Windsor shaking in the car all the way and when I walked into my parents’ house, my father gave me the biggest hug ever and said, ‘you’re not going back to law school. You’re going to be on the radio, and I know you’re going to succeed because you’re going to be the best at this.’ And, sure enough, a year and a half later I had my first single Carnival Hearts on 22 stations, and it was a Top 20 single.”
Signed to both Pheromone Recordings (part of the Cadence organization) with a publishing and A&R deal with Slaight Music, Diamond worked alongside producers Craig McConnell and Joel Stouffer (who is also Dragonette’s drummer).
“My first EP was kind of vague and I didn’t want to give away my personal life yet. I just wanted to introduce my sound and see what happens. This one is so deeply personal that my parents didn’t even hear it until it came out,” Diamond said.
It is, at its core, Dirty Laundry is a deep dive into the experience one has of being in a contentious intimate relationship, and coming out on the other end, battered but not broken – something anyone, be they straight or gay or bisexual can identify with. Jealousy is jealousy, heartbreak is heartbreak, and having a controlling personality that ultimately sabotages a formerly loving coupleship knows no boundary of race, religion, or sexuality. The fact of Diamond’s sexual preference is in some ways irrelevant for the tone and story being told in many of the songs on the EP.
“Listen, if you’re going to listen to my music, you’re going to know my story. I took all of the feelings that I was feeling during the breakup and I decided to be straight up with my audience and not beat around the bush. I am talking about my ex-girlfriend. I used to kind of shy away from using personal pronouns so that everybody could be able to dig my songs, but for this particular album I am delving right into it saying, ‘I am not hiding who I am singing about. I am a gay woman, and this is who I am, and I am singing about my ex-girlfriend.’ It’s just very on the nose, deeply personally and is very vulnerable. Leading up to the release I was going through this turmoil in the sense that I wrote the album at a time when I was so upset with her. Now that I have written the songs, I am over it, so I have this bit of guilt putting the album out there. There is a part of me that feels bad, and every artist doing these kinds of songs goes through it. Adele goes through it, even though she became a millionaire off 21, she said she did feel bad because the person who inspired it was still a part of her life,” Diamond explained.
“And, yes I am airing our dirty laundry and feel bad because I know there are always two sides to every story and it’s so unfair of me to voice mine so publicly. I am kind of hoping she doesn’t hear it. But that said, yes, she was involved with a singer/songwriter. I wrote this song called Next X for the EP, which talks about how she was always very upset at me every time I would sing about my exes while I was in a relationship with her. It made her so uncomfortable and so uneasy to know that I had history with other people. It’s kind of a catch 22, because you want to sing about things to make money in order to support the relationship, but you don’t want to offend the person that you’re with. It puts you in a real bind.
“It’s troubling when you are in that kind of a relationship because she convinced me that maybe I should stop writing about my exes. But I remember thinking, well what am I supposed to write about? Nobody really wants happy music, right? The problem was she didn’t want to be the next person to be written about, so Dirty Laundry may be her worst fear coming true. She did have it coming, to a certain degree, but I do feel some guilt because I am not that mean of a person. It’s just my story, and that is what happened to me and I have to be truthful.”
Diamond is adamant that she will not be defined as an artist or a human being by her sexuality. She is a talented, hard-working musician and songwriter who is gay and whose ‘coming out’ process is something she is happy to talk about, but which is arguably one shared by many.
“If I were to come out to people and then write music about me being gay, it would be kind of like me asking permission. So, a lot of artists will be afraid to use certain pronouns in their music, without okaying it with their fans first, for example. Whereas I don’t need permission to live my life the way I live it. At the forefront of my identity is not being gay, because I don’t think anybody’s sexuality is at the forefront of their identity, right? You as the interviewer are not first and foremost straight. I think that it shouldn’t be any different with me. I am who I am. I always say I am not a gay artist; I am an artist who happens to be gay. I just don’t want to be niched into one category, which is a wonderful, beautiful category with amazing artists who do do that, but that’s not what I am trying to do,” she said, explaining that in some songs, she does use ‘he’ as the main personal pronoun.
“I am happy you brought that up because two of my songs are highlighting the fact that I did flip flop for a while. I do come from a modern Orthodox Jewish family, and the schools that I went to were a lot more religious than my family. What we were taught was ‘gay’ is not a thing, don’t talk about it, don’t even want to be it. They thought it was something that was learned, and that gay doesn’t actually exist. When I was growing up, I knew I was gay but I would try and suppress it and even a couple of years ago, before I was completely solid on the fact of what I am and who I am, I would flip flop between men and women, and that’s just a part of who I am. It’s important to showcase that, yeah, I am gay, but I had to get there. For a while, I really didn’t know, because I am actually attracted to men. I think they are good looking people, but the emotional attachment just wasn’t there, and it took me a while to figure that out.
“It sort of was eye opening in the fact that I met somebody that I never imagined having feelings for and then all of a sudden I had feelings I couldn’t fight – all happening in the context of an incredibly intense dream one night. And that was the first instance of me experiencing incontrollable thought and uncontrollable feelings. So, I just embraced it and woke up and was like, ‘yeah, I feel this way.’”
As discussed above, while Diamond doesn’t base the entirety of her personal identity or musical career on her sexuality, she does use her platform and life experience to help those going through similar scenarios.
“Like I said, I come from a modern Orthodox Jewish community and one of my big causes is to fight for LGBT rights within the Jewish community, because I think we’re not quite there yet. And I know a lot of my following and my fan base comes from this community and I need people to hear what I went through, in order to understand that there are people that do exist that don’t fit certain stereotypes, and that’s okay,” she said.
“I would love to educate people as much as possible. As much as this EP was an anger outlet for me, I want people to be able to relate to my story and say, ‘that is what I am going through, and I see the result and it turned out okay.’”
Cry Wolf was one of the first singles to be released from Dirty Laundry and, again, is a theme that applies to relationships of all types and configurations: why don’t you act the same once you’ve got me, as you did when you were trying to win me?
“It was an instance where I had broken up with my ex, but we were in between getting back together. My best friend, who I lived with at the time, was going through the same thing with her boyfriend. So, one night we were sitting on the couch venting to each other and she said, ‘I just don’t get it. He knows all the right moves to get me back, and then when he gets me back, he forgets all the right moves,’” Diamond said.
“And I remember saying, ‘Oh my God, my girlfriend does the same thing.’ She makes all these promises and then when we get back together, she doesn’t keep them. So, my friend said, ‘yeah, it’s like she’s crying wolf or something.’ I immediately got my pen out and I wrote that down. And then I think I had a session in the studio the next day and I sat down with my producer and Cry Wolf came together in three hours.”
Look At Me Now could be said to be the endgame of the album. It’s imbued with a confident, bordering on sassy and stridently positive tone of one who has been freed from the shackles of a burdensome situation moving forward, with many lessons learned, a few more scars, but otherwise with head held high.
“That song was actually an afterthought. We had all the singles picked and Jim Campbell from Slaight Music said, ‘why don’t you get into the studio and see if we can beat whatever we have and if we can’t that’s our sign that we have the album.’ We booked a session with Joel and I was jamming to this song called Don’t Call Me Up by Mabel, which is an awesome British pop song. I showed it to them and said, ‘why don’t we make something super similar to this, but with my own message and my own personal anthem to help lift me up when I get down?’” she said.
“We started writing these lyrics and the song came out just so completely sassy and as my A&R guy at Slaight Jim Campbell says, it’s totally one of the cruellest songs I have ever written, especially the second verse, which is a kind of F.U. to my ex, but it’s also my instant upper, so I really love that song. And I think it’s a great addition to the album which, if you look at it, represents all the multiple personalities of a relationship – all the complexities. There are so many different feelings that accompany each part of the relationship continuum as you called it, and often all at the same time.”
Diamond is in the process of finalizing tour dates for her full band shows, which she hopes will take place later this fall and over the winter. For more information on tour dates, Dirty Laundry and more, visit her socials, as well as https://kayladiamond.com.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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