Kal arrives fashionably late for our interview which is to take
place in a shadowy corner of a typical North London boozer. As a
couple of locals stare into their flat lagers, Kal breezes in,
fresh from the hairdresser. Her bleached asymmetrical hair cut
makes me feel distinctly uncool and then she opens her mouth. I
hear her calm Irish drawl and know I'm in with love with her (I
know I start all my interviews saying this but what can I say...I
fall easily).
Kal tells me a bit about herself. She's Irish (duh), a
singer/songwriter who moved to London to find her fortune. She
describes her music as a merge of different genres: "folk, indie,
soul" and released her first EP last year (it's called Shivers)
which made it into the top five in the iTunes singer/songwriter
chart. Her single Breakfast At Tiffany's' was featured as the
iTunes single of the week, as well being used in the second series
of Lip Service.
Keen to find out more about Kal, I ask her to summarise her life
to date. We decide to start at birth. Kal skips forward to her
first encounter with a guitar which was when she 10, which she
admits she played "badly" and skims over some tense times between
her, her mother and a small Casio keyboard. She went on to win
competitions in Ireland and studied music at Rock school, which I
am assured was not run by Jack Black. She gigged with some
relatively minor acts like, you know, The Beach Boys and James
Brown and then made her way to London and started to work in a
bookshop. A relationship broke down and Kal decided to ditch the
book shop and start making music full-time, using the emotion of
heartbreak to fuel her songwriting.
Kal seems to have met many inspirational people on the music scene
and talks of one person in particular who has featured heavily in
her London story and that is Ed Sheeran, who she met when he was
just 16. Ed played frequently at Kal's accoustic night called W.E
love Sundays and asked Kal to accompany him on his U.K and Ireland
tour. All this experience of touring and gigging culminated last
year with Kal releasing her first EP, Shivers. Her latest project
has been creating a video to accompany one of her most popular
songs, Gypsy Blood, which was released yesterday on YouTube. I ask
Kal how the song came about and her response instantly strikes a
chord with me: "The birth of the song was just through a feeling
of, y'know, when you're seeing someone and you break up and you
just think "do they still think of me?' and I was just in that
phase where I was seeing somebody, I was into it more than them and
I thought, I'm being left behind and I felt really sad about it".
My stomach churns as Kal evokes a feeling that I can relate to and
I'm sure many others can relate to as well and I instantly see how
much of herself she puts into her music. When I ask her about the
choice of title of the track she says: "Gypsy Blood... I meant it
as in travelling people, they travel from place to place and I
think that somebody who has gypsy blood likes to move a lot and
move on and that also means, with people. So they're constantly
leaving people behind... namely ME!"
From listening to Gypsy Blood it is incredibly emotional and
obviously comes from a dark place. I ask Kal if she ever wishes she
could leave it behind and stop singing it. She responds: " No I
don't because singing that song is helping me deal with that
emotion because I don't really talk about it with my friends. I'm
sure I talked about it a lot at the time but your friends get bored
of it don't they? At least this way I can covertly bring it up
every night...on stage. Songwriting lets me be angry or be upset or
be lonely in a really okay way."
I feel myself becoming paranoid and wondering if this girl can
actually see into my mind but she reassures me with her next point
which is about how people generally react to her music. "A lot of
people say that they feel I'm singing about their life and I think
that's the most amazing thing that I can hear because if that's
their life, it's also my life and that means...i'm not crazy".
Phew, we've both established no one's crazy and Kal tells me about
the accompanying video to Gypsy Blood and how that came to be. The
video features the actress Selina MacDonald who starred in Ed
Sheeran's video 'The A Team' and who was always Kal's first choice
of actress. Kal claims Selina added a whole new element to the song
and made it like a "movie". Kal wants to leave the video open to
the viewers' interpretation and avoids a full description of the
concept but tells me some of the main themes of the video which
are; being left behind, betrayal and loss by someone with a
"buoyant heart" which just keeps bouncing back when yours is left
broken on the floor.
I want to move on to a woman close to my heart, Heather Peace, who
Kal supported on a couple of her tour dates earlier this year when
a friend of hers couldn't make it. Kal describes the experience: "I
didn't think she'd be as nice as she was but she was really, really
nice and really down to earth and funny. Her audiences were really
friendly and after the shows, I went to the merch table and a girl
came up to me and asked me to sign her arm, so I signed it and a
couple of days later she Facebooked me and said she was getting it
tattooed!". I ponder on whether I can contact this girl to see
where she got her tattoo done so I can book mine whilst Kal
continues to wax lyrical about Heather: "I think that she has an
amazing voice, I really like her stage presence and she writes
great songs, it was a real pleasure to support her."
Kal has a massive female following and admits the ratio of women
to men is about 60:40 so I ask her why she thinks this is and
comment that the honest and raw aspect of Kal's music reminds me of
other female singers like Melissa Etheridge and Ani Di Franco. "I
think women seem to relate especially to my music and I think it's
because I'm very open about the emotions I feel and I think women
allow themselves to feel those emotions and acknowledge they feel
them in general moreso then men.".
Kal holds an acoustic night every Sunday at the World's End Pub in
Finsbury park for up and coming musicians and she often gets coaxed
up stage as well, with free sweets, board games and roast
potatoes!
Purchase Kal's EP 'Shivers' now on iTunes
Twitter.com/kallavelle
Soundcloud.com/kallavelle
YouTube.com/Kallavelle
