Musician & Model Okay Kaya On The Art of Duality

Interview by James Wright

In 2015, a music video from a Norwegian-American singer called Kaya Wilkins, A.K.A, Okay Kaya found its way on to our playlist on a cold late night in November. The song, ‘I’m Stupid (But I Love You) never made it on to an album, or any streaming platforms. Nine years later, the song lives on YouTube, just as fragile and intimate as when it first aired. Much of Kaya's other early music and accompanying videos on tracks like ‘Durer’, ‘Damn Gravity’ and ‘Clenched Teeth’ were windows to a new artist with a voice and vision that felt contemporary and compassionate. 

Over the last decade, the singer and sometime model has since created musical characters, themes and musical motifs across seven albums. The work has always felt both expansive in its curiosity and experimentation, and also intimate, introspective and searching. Debut and sophomore albums ‘Both’ and ‘Watch the Liquid Pour Itself’ mapped feelings and questions on sexuality, identity, mental health and love with humor and honesty. Subsequent albums’Surviving is the New Living, ’SAP’ and ‘Oh my God – That’s So Me’ pushed Kaya's sparer, folk-like storytelling boundaries, and incorporated diverse and ranging influences from disco to punk re-tellings of Shirley Collins’ ‘Space Girl'. Along the way, Kaya’s covers of Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still the One’, Harry Nilsson’s ‘Without Her’ and Cher’s ‘Believe’ also became instant cult favorites. 

Now, after years living in the creative quicksands of New York and Berlin, life is rooted on a remote island in Norway, reachable only by boat. Having grown-up in the tiny Norwegian peninsula of Nessoden, it feels like a homecoming. The restlessness of self-discovery and broad, prolific creation have softened into a stillness and confidence. With a slower life comes a new approach to making music and Kaya’s recent record with fellow Scandinavian-American, Baba Stiltz ‘Blurb’ is a beautiful, tender collaboration.

We talk with Kaya about the difference between solitude and loneliness, how to evolve as a musical artist, teachings and experiences in the fashion industry and the greatest opening line ever written.

James Wright: Hello my friend. You’re in London – how is it?

Okay Kaya (aka KayaWilkins): It's been good, I've been here for two months now. I live on an island near Oslo, but you can't get there in winter, so…here we are. We moved almost two years, or seasons, ago, to see if we would like it, and then…we liked it.

JW: I find myself asking this question to everyone nowadays, maybe because we're getting older and the world's so surreal, but as a touring artist, what does the concept of home mean to you now? You grew up in Norway and then America, and have moved from the relentlessness of New York, to an island in Norway. How has that drastic shift been for you?

OK: In hindsight, growing up where I did was lovely. I only realised that fourteen years after leaving. Because I tour so much and, because we work in so many different places, it's really nice to have a base that is quiet. We can have a bit more space and it's not wildly expensive like all the big cities are. I love the contrast between touring and home. But home, day-to-day might be...wake up whenever, go look at the ocean, go back to the house, have a coffee, go to my little, Virginia Woolf-style shed of my own, play music and then maybe take the boat out, go shopping for the week. Full hermit lives.

JW: You have to take a boat to get to the mainland?

OK: Yeah, but it's only about ten minutes.

JW: Do you have neighbours?

OK: Well, we live on an island with fifty houses. They're summer houses, which means we get a really good price. But that's why we're in England now, because we can't stay through winter — it ices over. I have one neighbour who's really lovely. He's actually a well-known Norwegian actor. Growing up, I’d see him on TV and now, he lends us his golf cart, helps us chop wood and stuff. He's really cool.

JW: How has the contrast felt between the melting-pot of New York and Norway’s comparatively homogeneous society? Did that affect you growing up? Did you find New York a breath of fresh air? And now that you're back in Norway, in terms of your own identity, how do you view that duality, or the way those two places have shaped you?

OK: That’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Actually, when I met Baba Stiltz there were so many similarities between us — in terms of being sort of Scandinavian but also American and also mixed race. I’ve realised I have a bunch of friends in Norway who do the splits between all sorts of countries and identities. It's tricky because I think sometimes you don't feel at home anywhere when you're raised in such different cultures. But in terms of hermit culture vibes, I would say I do feel quite Norwegian now. Being alone a lot and getting the boat out and talking to one person a day — that's kind of the thing I missed, just that void of human interaction. I don't know if it's a cultural thing, or just a thing that I need, or just the thing that I need in order to create.

JW: I was listening to your latest record, ‘Blurb’ (which you’re about to perform in London as part of your collaboration with Baba Stiltz) and on the track, Boys in the Girls Room, I noticed there’s a little guitar solo — I don't think I've heard a guitar solo in years: I loved it. How did this collaboration come about?

OK: I'd known about Baba’s music for a long time and really liked it, and then our mutual friend in Norway was like, Oh why don't you just ask him to do a remix or hang out and meet up? And then we did. So it just happened pretty immediately after that – we were like, Oh let's just try to make music together, which was cool. There were a few references, but most of it was just kind of unspoken.

JW: Your collaborations with other artists always feel intimate. In this one, there’s a sort of tenderness that comes through in the music...

OK: It's weird because we were obviously hanging out a lot for quite a long time making the EP, but then he moved to LA which is so far away. He got here a week early, so today we had our first rehearsal. We're excited to play the songs live, because we haven't played them live before. But at the same time, we're also just like, let's make more music. I love working with him.

JW: I remember you previously speaking to me about solitude and songwriting. Obviously I'm not a songwriter, but I think we're quite similar in that sense – I need solitude, and it helps me in many ways. Do you think about that distinction between solitude and loneliness, and though you're married now, how does solitude and loneliness affect your work and your process?

OK: There's definitely a big distinction. It has to do with the emotional difference. I haven't really thought about it as much as I should have in hindsight, probably because of Covid, and a lot of rapid life changes. But I think maybe New York city life got quite lonely for me, even though it was hyper-social. I was around millions of people. So getting back to nature, and proper solitude — that weirdly has made me less lonely and forced me to make more effort to see friends, to talk to people and get out of my comfort zone socially. 

JW: It is funny — in Los Angeles, unlike in New York and London, in order to see people and do things here, you do have to be intentional; you won't collide into people, life doesn't collide into you. I’ve always enjoyed that. You can have your space and your solitude if you want it, but you have to make the effort to engage, because otherwise it won't happen. How often do you go into Oslo? 

OK: Maybe once a week. I get a lot of bang for my buck. I'll maybe see a couple of friends, go to the cinema or to a gig, go to a charity shop, get a fancy coffee, go home. But a lot of people who aren’t in the quote-unquote creative industry work from 9-5 every day so they’re only free at the weekend. And maybe it has to do with age, but I’ve started to treat songwriting and creative endeavours in that same way, like a job. I'm not like just like making music until four in the morning and partying anymore. Now I relax on the weekends.

JW: I remember going over to a Norwegian island called Nesodden, and I remember trying to describe what I did for a living to my friend’s family, and I was looked at like an alien. Everyone seemed to work for the state, or have set working hours. The idea of lack of security, or boundaries, was incomprehensible. They were kind of horrified by the idea I might not know where my next pay-check is coming from.

OK: I enjoy hanging out with my old friends and realising it's fine, or that some people are fortunate to have a really stable life, and actually, what’s strange is that I actually wouldn't mind a job. 

JW: What's the best weather to create music in, given your setting? Is there something from a romantic perspective that you get from writing in the cold, and perhaps even bleak winter?

OK: I'm gonna go for no. The only thing that bothers me truly is wind. Stormy wind. I don't like hearing it, I don't like being around it.

JW: That's interesting, because that's often a meditation sound people put on to get to sleep.

OK: Yeah, that's batshit to me. Right now it's actually storming outside. The rain, on the other hand, I can't wait for because the rain is an amazing sound. But now it's like thunder and wind of sirens, wind everywhere. Terrifying.

JW: Do you ever make field recordings? Do you remember when Fred Again was little-known but used to record and sample loads of voice memos, like on the bus with someone speaking in the background, or for example, the wind – do you ever do that sort of thing yourself?

OK: I do a lot of field recording, but my favourite is hydrophones. I like recording underwater. I have a hydrophone I've done a few projects with. That said, I think the iPhone is kind of a perfect field recorder. I recently looked at my iPhone voice memos and there are like 4,000 voice memos that are unnamed. Most of them are  just me at five in the morning waking up because I think I have a brilliant idea.  

JW: I often think about our two days together in Oslo — putting on your concert in a mausoleum with candles and how we didn’t have the right sound equipment, but it didn't matter. And then how we did that shoot in a sculpture garden with no equipment, no help. It felt very pure and those are really the moments that I look back on and think, that's why we did it – the magazine.

OK: It was so special.

JW: How do you, if at all, look back on the side-quest of fashion — that world and ecosystem? Do you have opinions about it, and have they evolved over time?

OK: It’s definitely a hindsight thing again. When it was all happening, it was a lot. I mean, you know what it's like with all that travel. I’ve only just come to be able to be like, Oh, that happened. That was cool. Some memories are coming back from like, more of a fugue, or stress state. But I think living on an island has helped me to just process. And not only with negative emotions. I just needed to relax or something, and then there's actually gratitude looking back.

JW: I know exactly what you mean.

Do you think your confidence has changed over the years? I sense a lightness to you now…How has that set of experiences in the fashion world shaped your perspective? And did they translate into your music in some way? 

OK: I wonder if music has made me more confident. I don't know if fashion did. I think I felt quite natural in front of the camera from the start, so that was all positive. But the thing that has made me more confident is continuing to do the thing I wasn't that confident doing at first, which was music. And just keeping at that and being really quite stubborn about doing it, until it's something that I did almost like a reflex. And when something becomes reflexive, a lot of anxiety goes away. It all comes down to repetition.

It was actually probably only a year before that day in the mausoleum, where I'd gone to see a hypnotist because I got so much stage fright and I would just be like dying every time I played a gig. Obviously I still get nervous but just doing it more and getting feedback that the music I write has helped other people…that's given me the confidence to just do it. It also helps to know that I’m continuing to build something – staying curious and not really knowing what it is, until I look back.

JW: I would say there's been a pretty significant evolution, thinking back over your music and your music videos, and tracks like Damn, Gravity and I'm Stupid (But I Love You). What from those earlier days do you look back on with great fondness?  

OK: Okay, for me, after a while, the songs don’t feel like they belong to me anymore. So on tour, for example, if I'm playing to an audience and someone wants me to play a song, I might not be as emotionally attached to it anymore, but I will play it, because someone requested it. It almost feels like it’s outside of me, emotionally more and more. But then, if I write a really new song, then I'll really be in it. 

JW: When you first started getting feedback — be it a comment under a YouTube video or a message or someone coming up to you after a show — was there any one song in particular that people connected to emotionally and were telling you how and why?

OK: There were a few! A lot of the tracks people connected with early on were really depressive songs, like the I Die Slow song, about never-ending illness, which I don't, luckily today, connect with in that way anymore. I think maybe that was one of the first ones.

JW: You know, we still have the rushes from that mausoleum concert. And when you played that song, I was like, oof! It broke me, fully. But it was actually seeing you perform Damn Gravity when Lewis and I (my So It Goes Magazine co-founder) were like, okay, that's special. And that's when I think we pitched you directly. 

I loved the track I'm stupid (But I love you), and the video for that as well. That was, god, I don't know what I was going through at that point, but that...I still think it's so beautiful. I don't know how you relate to that song now?

OK: I still love it, and the video – that was directed by my friend, Sam Kuhn. Actually, I spoke to him recently and I was like, hey, do you want to do some more stuff soon? He and I did something in Paris a year ago where I was doing some fake mime stuff. Yeah. Anyway, I think he just captured that so well in that video. I think, with the vocals…you know, when you start making music, you're not really aware that you're emulating someone. But I think with the first few songs that I put out, I didn't actually use my ‘real’, or Norwegian accent. It just sounds like a different woman. But then, I guess it would be weird if I hadn't changed at all in ten years. 

JW: Each of your albums feel so distinct from the next. I don't think there are that many people that can do that with the creative dexterity that you do. They all feel so uniquely their own thing while still being you. On Oh My God – That's So Me, there's disco, there's funky, Arthur Russell-y stuff, on The Groke, then a punk-y thing on Space Girl, which I love. And it’s soulful...there's so much in there that pulls on different worlds of music. How does that quilt of an album come together for you, or is it just song by song?

OK: Well, it's a little bit tricky. I hear the songs in their genre normally, but then I like to try to subvert the genre somewhat, and I don’t want them to feel of a time, even though I like all the genres in the whole world, apart from new metal. So, I guess the lyrics have a character. And then when I make a record, I think about the songs as having friends. They don’t need to be sonic friends. It can be like lyrical friends, but sonically in friction with each other or lyrically in friction with each other. I make this weird little game, which is really a way to limit myself. And I think about this all the time, because sometimes I've heard that my records are kind of all over the shop. But I like to be really consistently inconsistent — there's a lot of weird thinking and red-threadiness that I make for myself. I self-impose a lot of limitations to make a record. Basically, I'm just sitting there with a whiteboard, thinking about how to connect something that shouldn't, if you know what I mean.

JW:  One of your albums is called Both. I have been working with a physical therapist who talks a lot about ‘property dualism’. How do you view that dual relationship with the weird sisters of yourself now? And are they happily or unhappily reconcilable? And is one of them braver than the other?

OK: I haven't thought about my twin for a long time now. That means there must be some sort of a merger. It's very contemporary to make a merger. Soon it'll all just be one big conglomerate. So, that's probably good. Obviously there's duality to every sort of person, and it can be freeing when you're writing music to look at things from another perspective, even if it's just some sort of weird pseudo self. We're all so attached to ourselves and our identities. It's not always the best for creative output. 

I was thinking about a book I read the other day called How to Be Animal (by Melanie Challenger) and how it talks about the fact that we just so desperately want to run away from this fleshy body thing that is animal, even though that detaches us from the soul that exists within the fleshiness of it all. I think about that a lot, even if just the cerebral body stuff – needing to be maintained in order to feel somewhat of a balance.

JW: Have you ever heard of someone called Feldenkrais? 

OK: No

JW: He was an Israeli engineer, physicist and then, bizarrely, a physical therapist. He has the craziest life story — he was one of the fathers of somatic therapy. I think you'd find him really interesting. His work makes me think of what David Lynch calls the ‘dive within’. Without the dive within, none of the other stuff matters.

OK: Wait, can I ask you a question — so are you into meditating now then?

JW: Yes.

OK: Transcendental?

JW: Well, Vedic meditation, which essentially is where ™ comes from. I think maybe some of what you're saying with the songwriting, in terms of detachment and about running, kind of away from your body and getting away from the pain, as opposed to running towards the danger, as Sarah Polley puts it.

Is there a song lyric, yours or someone else's, that permanently altered the way you see the world? Because mine, off your last solo album, is, “Life is Nietzsche on the beach and then you die”.

OK: I did have fun with that one. It was actually kind of an interesting song to write, because it became this re-channeling of constant negative circuits. Ending every sentence with, even if it's a negative one, “And I have a blessed life”, was something that I learned.

JW: Can I steal that?

OK: It really weirdly worked. I was learning it in a group retreat-y setting, where I was also a voyeur because I can't help writing about everything. So as I was being taught that, I was already judging the method. So the song already was writing itself as I was judging people who taught me this trick that actually ended up working or whatever. But in terms of other people's songs, honestly, the thing that I think about is entries to songs a lot — the first few sentences of a song. The one I think about the most is: “I believe in miracles”. The Hot Chocolate song? I think about that every week at least. I just think it's so beautiful. It makes me really happy.

JW:  I never even thought about those being the opening lyrics to a Hot Chocolate song, but I think about that phrase, and say it to myself when there's something good happening, or when I have a break-through...I’m only just realising what an amazing opening line that is. 

Speaking of which, in terms of the covers you choose to make, how do you land on a song? Is it partly because you want to do an interpretation that's drastically different to Cher or Shania Twain or Harry Nilsson?

OK: Yeah, I definitely want it to be different. I think covers that sound like the song are kind of bizarre, but can also be cool. It's just always been one of my favourite practices. I'm not musically trained, so learning a song could be quite  a painful, slow process, then I  would eventually learn the chords, and then that would somehow integrate into my limited skills as a musician. So it's always been a part of the practice. I really want to cover Tina Turner's Private Dance next, but it might be too much like blasphemy.

JW: I think you should do it. I have no idea how it works with permissions? Are you just allowed to cover a song and release it to the world?

 OK: Yeah, but there are publishing splits. So let's say I cover a song: if it gets played more than a gajillion times on Spotify – because that's actually when you make $10 – then 50% goes to the actual songwriter.

JW: Obviously it's getting harder and harder to be a recording artist these days, with the music industry changing so fast in terms of actually making an income. What are your thoughts about the future of the thing that you love to do and have been doing? Does it still feel sustainable?

OK: For me, it was flirting with becoming sustainable maybe around 2020 when I had a couple bands going. I'm not the kind of artist that continuously has these big spikes. The only reason I've been able to be in cities at all is because of fashion jobs, and they're nothing to do with music a lot of the time. I'm really grateful for that though, because I've been able to make so many songs. That said, I really hope the landscape changes; I hope that there'll be a fair repayment. Most of the musicians and artists I know have multiple other jobs to sustain living in big cities. Luckily, in Norway there are grants, so there are all sorts of artists making really weird stuff that doesn't have to be commercially viable. I'm quite into that.

JW: How do you feel about Chappell Roan getting up at the Grammys and speaking about unions and paying artists fairly, and then getting criticised for what people were calling a virtue signaling, grandstanding moment? 

OK: Well it does feel bleak at the moment. But I think there was a moment during COVID times where I did think, maybe after this thing ends there'll be basic universal income, and I was thinking about all these different structures and I thought that was quite exciting. But then obviously it just reverted completely back to nothing — no support for anyone. 

JW: Someone said to me yesterday: “What do you think the opposite of darkness is?” I said “light”. She said: “No, darkness isn't the opposite of light. Darkness is simply the absence of light.” And whether it's music or art or film, during times of pinch-yourself dystopian existence, where it’s harder than ever to make work, that's what you still do: provide light. 

OK: And you have your light too. Everybody does.

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