Artist Profile: Sarah Kinsley on ‘Escaper’ and Her Musical Journey

For singer-songwriter Sarah Kinsley, music is experimental — an amalgamation of the environments and emotions around her.

Her creativity, she said, comes from the fearless embrace of potential failure: “Stopping yourself from failing is the thing that kills the spirit of creative action.”

This experimentalism certainly came through in Kinsley’s latest album, “Escaper,” which she described as more “intense” and “cohesive” compared to her previous music.

“Escaper” was inspired by the feelings of grief, loss, and love that Kinsley was experiencing at the time of the album’s fruition.

Through the process of writing the album, Kinsley grapples with deep, isolating emotions. “It’s very much like a memoir of this time I was going through and somebody who’s trying to run away from fear or angst,” Kinsley said.

The album gave Kinsley the opportunity to explore the complex experience of healing from pain, reconciling both the negative feelings associated with grief and celebrating the love she experiences from her relationships. Her music reflects the journey of embracing the world after difficult times.

By the end of the album, according to Kinsley, “this character of the album, or some projection of me, returns to herself and chooses the world and wants to choose a very optimistic outcome amidst the sort of darker stuff of death and grief.”

In “Escaper,” Kinsley captures the escape from reality that comes from navigating loss and simultaneously documents the healing experience of returning to celebrate the love around her.

“The album, for me, is very much about hope and beauty,” Kinsley said.

What’s most remarkable about this album, beyond the story it tells, is its unique blend of sounds, arising from Kinsley’s experimentation with various instruments.

When asked how she discovered the nonconventional instruments featured on the album — like glass singing bowls and contact mics — Kinsley said, “It's funny, because I feel like sometimes it just depends what you’re around.”

One of Kinsley’s college professors introduced her to the contact mic, a “founding part of [her] musicianship,” in her last two years of college, and she picked up the glass bowls, the analogue synths, and ondes Martenot from her album co-producer. The sounds that make up Kinsley’s music symbolize the people and experiences that Kinsley has encountered in her musical career — a manifestation of Kinsley’s experimental style that ultimately characterizes her distinctive musical sound.

“I'm just always trying to be in front of the weirder sounds and seeing how they might play into my music,” Kinsley said.

As a young musician, Kinsley was initially trained to play classical instruments. The pivot towards singing came in her senior year of high school when she learned about musical production.

“Learning how to control the landscape around my voice was really fascinating,” Kinsley said. “I just fell in love with singing so much.”

Kinsley has just wrapped up her North America tour and is now embarking on her European tour. When asked about the highlights of being on tour, Kinsley spoke most about the people: the audience and her band.

“I feed a lot off of other people's energy,” Kinsley said. “I rely on audience energy, and I want to feel that stuff, and also my band, they’re just incredible.”

The audience certainly feels the personal nature of Kinsley’s music.

“I feel so strange sometimes because I feel like these people know me really well,” Kinsley said. She identifies a sense of community within her fans, observing the unifying feeling of people coming together who all know her music. Sometimes, the depth and passion of Kinsley’s fanbase surprises her as well.

“It's been very awesome to watch people in all these different cities know the lyrics to songs that I just didn’t think they would,” Kinsley said. “It still kind of blows my mind.”

Kinsley’s band is a main source of support for her as she travels the world with them. She explained that she loves every member of her band, and they “make these shows something incredible.”

On stage, Kinsley’s favorite song to perform is a single off “Escaper,” titled “My Name is Dancing.”

“It’s just very vocally expressive, it feels like such a big sigh of relief to sing that song,” Kinsley said.

Her performance certainly lives up to the song’s name. Not only is her music vocally expressive, but on stage, her presence is equally physically expressive. While singing, Kinsley dances around, jumping and spinning across the stage. Her movements are not carefully choreographed; instead they are freeform, almost random, movements, fueled by energy and joy.

“You have this wonderful body,” Kinsley said. “You can move, why not do it?”

Kinsley is now embarking on the European leg of her tour. Looking ahead, Kinsley’s immediate goal is closing out the rest of her tour.

But beyond the tour, Kinsley has begun to think about what’s coming next in her music: “I would like to go in a very different direction, I think I have a very blurry understanding of what that is, but I like very immense change.”

The common thread in Kinsley’s artistic career is an unbounded creative spirit, seen in everything from the sounds she incorporates into her music to the way she dances on stage. As Kinsley continues writing the next chapters of her musical career, her sound will continue to evolve as she draws inspiration from new environments. Kinsley hopes one day to write music for a movie, perhaps an exciting eventual project for fans to look out for.

“I’m trying to be very open with all the space and not force anything on my mind.”

—Staff writer Juliet Bu can be reached at juliet.bu@thecrimson.com.