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INTERVIEWS ARDEN KAYWIN NOTHING TYPICAL
ARDEN KAYWIN TALKS TO ROCKWIRED ABOUT HER DEBUT CD 'QUARTER LIFE CRISIS' WRITING POP SONGS IN DEEP SECRECY AND NOT BEING TYPICAL  INTERVIEWED BY BRIAN LUSH There
is something exciting about being young and in a crisis. It's that
time in your life where the decisions you make stay with you for hte
rest of your life; Good or bad. So far, it's all been good for ARDEN
KAYWIN.Her debut CD QUARTER LIFE CRISIS is getting a huge response in
the LA music scene and beyond. KAYWIN proves that songwriting
is her lifes work. This CD is collection of intelligent pop
songs that speak about the things one wants and things one has to do.
Emancipation has never sounded better. Where are you from? Miami, Florida Was music in your upbringing at all or encouraged by family or anything like that? I don't have any family members who are professional musicians or anything. I was always encouraged by my parents, who themselves aren't really musical. My mom tinkered on the piano occassionally. It's very funny. When I went back home not to long ago, and we (my family) were going through some old home movies and the oldest home movies with me in them were when I was an infant and in all of them, my mother is singing to me. No wonder I became a singer and a musician. My mother made a song out of everything. I must've gravitated toward music because that was what had soothed me then, and it continues to do that to this day. No one in my family was musical in the professional sense but definitely creative and musically appreciative. Who did you grow up listening to? When I was a kid, I grew up in the sort of mid-eighties, which was like WHITNEY HOUSTON and MARIAH CAREY. I just wanted to be them. I would run around immitating the two of them. When I got older in High School and had access to a wider range of music, I really became absolutely enamoured with TORI AMOS and others like the INDIGO GIRLS, COUNTING CROWS. These were the three most influential artists/bands of my adolescence. Even to this day, when TORI AMOS comes out with a new album, I'll buy it without thinking twice, without listening to it or reading a review just because she is who she is. She's an amazing storyteller and an amazing musician. In college, my tastes have broadened. I never really listened to hard rock or hip-hop when I was in high school and now, I have a much more ecclectic music taste which influences what I write for sure. You can't tell that I was listening to MISSY ELLIOT alot when I was writing my album. I know where those little influences are in some of the songs but I'd never point them out to anyone because they're going to be like "Oh my God! MISSY ELLIOT!!! Are you kidding me?" I think being open to other forms of music can only help you as a musician, even if it's not your thing neccessarily. And you studied at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music? I did. Wow! What was that experience like? Well, I would never trade it. Even though I'm not doing classical music now in my professional life, it has given me a set of tools and a set of historical references that I think make me a more well rounded musician in general, but being in a conservatory environment, you are completely submerged in classical music. I think some conservatories are different than others but Oberlin was a very traditional conservatory in the sense that if you did anything different, the other students looked at you kind of weird. If you wanted to do musical theater or something or wanted to do pop or rock you became the outsider. I never really explored my pop sensibilities publicly when I was at Oberlin. I would go into the practice rooms and do my thing and then I'd go to class and then I'd go home and close my door and write pop songs that nobody knew about. My friends to this day, who I studied classical music with, listen to my music now and they're like "Oh my God!!! Who knew!" When did songwriting begin for you? How did that happen? I always used to write when I was in Junior High and in High School. As a kid I studied Suzuki piano. I don't know if you know anything about Suzuki method but it teaches children to play instruments by ear, so you learn by ear even before you learn to read music. I would sit down at the piano when I was in Junior high and in High school and listen to all of those songs that I loved by TORI AMOS, SARAH MCLACHLAN and THE INDIGO GIRLS and I would figure them out on the piano, and I would sit there and play them and that morphed into making songs on my own. I started off writing music first and not being a lyricist and I would have friends who would write poems about a guy who dumped them and we would set them to music in my living room. That was how the songwriting began. In college, it became my hobby and my release because I was doing very serious classical music in school. Some people would paint, some people would keep a journal, I wrote songs. I never really intended to play them for anybody and I never intended at the time to do anything with it because my focus was classical music. When did you get to the point of wanting to share you music with an audience? I actually did classical music professionally after college and when I was doing that I was getting burned out very quickly. At the time, my brother who is in the film business, got me hooked into doing some writing and recording for this independent film soundtrack. I don't know what ever happened with that film, I don't think they ever released it but that was my first experience in the recording studio doing pop music and writing and collaborating and that was coinciding with me being burned out with the whole classical thing and me questioning what I wanted to do with my life and hence the title of the CD QUARTER LIFE CRISIS. A lot of the music on this CD was written during my own quarter life crisis. After being in the studio, I thought "You know what? I need to figure out what I want." So I moved to Los Angeles and I spent about a year with one foot in the classical world and one foot in the pop world and after the things in the pop world started taking off and I saw that people were responding to what I was doing, it really gave me the confidence to say "...I'm gonna cut an album, I'm gonna start touring -" and a year and a half later, here I am. You've worked with some names here on you first CD like ROB JACOBS (ALANIS MORRISETTE, BON JOVI, SHAKIRA) and RUDY HAEUSERMANN (LISA MARIE PRESLEY). How did you get to know these guys. Was this through your brother? It was was one of those fluke-y kind of friend things how I got hooked up with RUDY. A friend of his knew a friend of mine and I was looking for someone to produce the album. RUDY is this incredibly down to earth guy and a great producer and we clicked right away. We did one song together first to see how it would go and we both really enjoyed the experience so he jumped on board and hen we finished, I knew of ROB JACOBS because of the work he had done on ALANIS MORRISETTE'S album UNDER RUG SWEPT. I think he did an amazing job on that album. ROB is so well known and he's GRAMMY-nominated and I basically decided that I was going to cold call his manager. I was nobody. All that I had were rough mixes. I didn't even have a manager. Nobody knew who I was. There's this old saying, "The silent wheel doesn't get oiled". I was going to find out who this guys' manager was. I googled him and found the number of his manager and cold called him and I said"Listen, I know he's used to working with big signed artists, but I've got this product and if he would just listen to and if he responds to it at all, would he consider working with someone who is unknown." The manger was a little skeptical but he wasked mee to send him the rough mixes and I didn't hear anytihg for a month. All of a sudden he called me backsaying that he played it for ROB and that he really liked it. After that we met and ROB mixed the whole album for the price of one track . He knew I was indie- I couldn't afford his usual fee. He responded to the material enough to jump on board and that's what RUDY did to and I could not have asked for a better team in that way. they jumped behind me and help me cut this amazing album. Now that the recording is completed, is the finished product everything that you hoped it would be? Yeah. It really is. Sometimes you have to force yourself to look at what you've done and pat yourself onthe back. Sometimes I find myself so focused on what next and I don't look back at what I've accomplished but when I listen to this album I'm really amazed that I did this. I hope that when peopl listen to it they can relate to it. It doesn't matter who produced it, it doesn't matter who mixed it as long as you dig on the music and wht to keep listeing to it, that's all I can ask for. Are there any songs from this CD that stick out for you particularly? My two or three favorite tracks onthe album would be ON THE EDGE. It's the second track onthe album. It's a very personal song for me and it's the first song that we finished so it's special to me in that way as well. ME WITH ME is the first track off of the album and that's my empowerment song. I wrote it when I had a really bad date and I came back and I was like "I don't need anybody! I don't need a guy. I need to be with me" and I think a lot of people have felt that way. There is a song called TYPICAL. That song is personal to me because I think that there are a lot of women my age in their early to mid twenties who feel stuck. It's the quarter life crisis thing but added to that gender roles (i.e. Where do I fit in as a woman? Do I get married? Have kids? Do I work?) So many women get caught up in that and they just end being typical. Their beauty, uniqueness and talents are sacrificed because they want to take the easy route instead of soul searching and realizing that we only have so much time on this earth. The song is sayin "Don't be typical...Be who you are." That was a hard lesson for me to learn. How are the live shows? How are they? They rock!!! What are they like for you? It depends on what kind of show we're doing. I have two kinds of shows that I do. If I'm going to play a larger venue like the AVALON , I take my full band. there are six of us and I'll sit downand play three of four songs out of the set and other times I'll have a keyboard player play the keyboard parts and I'll just do the singing. It's much more of a show than it is an intimate experience. When i play small, more acoustic venues, I'll play piano and have a guitar player and a back up singer and it's much more intimate because I'm playing the whole time. Any plans for a tour at all? So far, I have some one-off dates that I'm working on. I'm going to be in Miami, Chicago and Columbus and SanFrancisco. We're waiting to see if I get this spot in SOUTH BY SOUTHWEST this summer. What do you want a listener to walk away with after hearing your CD? I just want them to find some kernel of their own truth in what I'm saying. It could something inthe lyrics or a feeling from the music, something they can take with them that relates to their own life. That would have to be it. |
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