Letting Go with Kimaya Diggs: On her Newest Album and Striving for More
I had the opportunity to sit down with Kimaya Diggs, a Swat alum from the class of 2015, over Zoom last week to talk about her sophomore album Quincy, which she released today. She had given us special access to the album ahead of its release. Calling in from my room in Mary Lyon, Diggs answered my questions about her process, her feelings about the work, and her goals with this project from her pink, morning-lit room in Western Massachusetts. Here is what she had to say:
Quincy album cover from https://www.kimayadiggs.com/
Aryan Ashraf: So, you got a new album on the way! I’m sure you’re very excited.
Kimaya Diggs: I am! I started recording this album in early 2020, so it’s been, like, a bit of time coming. I started writing the songs even before that, so I’m just very excited that it’s finally on its way out!
AA: Yes, and thank you so much for allowing us to listen to it ahead of time. I loved the album by the way! It’s so, so pretty.
KD: Thank you so much! It’s very different from my first album, which was very folk-y, singer-songwriter-y, and, for years, I’ve been playing with a full band, but I didn’t have any recordings out there that reflected what I do live, so I just can’t wait to have it out. It was nerve-wracking to put out the first two singles because, you know, it’s weird ‘cause like recording just feels like such a huge process, but it’s behind-the-scenes. Nobody knows how much work really goes into it, but now it’s like the public half of the whole process, and it’s just nerve-wracking to put it out.
AA: I’m sure. Releasing stuff is always a very vulnerable thing, right?
KD: Yeah, definitely.
AA: Your vocals definitely stand out on the album. The way everything is arranged in the vocals, even in the instrumentals–flute solos came in when I didn’t expect them to. It sounds a little perfectionist in how it's all organized. Would you say you are one when it comes to production?
KD: I would say to some extent. I was able to collaborate with a lot of other really great people, mostly who come from the indie rock world, so, a lot of times, their recommendations and what they thought was gonna be the next step were really different from what I was expecting. I trusted the people I was collaborating with to create something that they believed in as well, so I did have to relinquish a little bit of the control in that sense. But, as far as most of the vocals go and the arrangements, I was able to demo out a lot of them in my home studio before we went into the other studio, and I really did have a pretty strong vision of what I was looking for with that.
It was exciting, too! When I was at Swarthmore, I actually got a vocal injury, and, a couple years after I graduated, three years maybe, I ended up having to have vocal surgery because I couldn’t even speak for more than twenty minutes a day. My first album was recorded with that vocal injury, so being able to actually use my voice how I can now is just so exciting for me. I knew that this album had to be so centered around the vocals.
AA: So, this is, like, the album with your voice fully healed, and it was something you wanted to put on display?
KD: Yeah, exactly! And I’m so happy you mentioned the flute solos because that’s my dad!
AA: Who played the bass? The bass lines were very rich all throughout every song!
KD: That’s my partner, Jacob Rosazza! He’s in a band called LuxDeluxe. He is in my live band, but he also co-produced most of the songs with me.
AA: You’ve developed your guitar playing, too, with this album, right?
KD: I did, yeah! So, I actually did not write any songs or played guitar at all until literally my Senior Spring [of college]. I felt bad for my neighbors, I lived in Wharton AB, and everyone was like “Oh! You’re the one that plays guitar, like, all the time but not that good!” So, it was really fun to get an opportunity, as I was recovering from my vocal injury, to really lean into guitar, and this album… I ended up playing most of the guitar tracks, which was not the case for my first album.
AA: It’s a new personal musical development, right?
KD: Definitely!
AA: With all of that in mind, the vibe I got from the album was a cathartic one. We already mentioned the vocal injury, but it also seems like this album was coming from a lot of tumultuous events that occurred recently in your life, and I wanted to ask what this album means to you in that sense, as a cathartic release.
KD: Yeah, that’s a great question. During the process of recording this, my mom died, as well as my musical mentor and my dog, in a six-month period. It was a really wild year that just kept getting worse. My mom was 62 when she died, and there were a handful of things I knew that she really wanted to do that she didn’t get an opportunity to do, like writing a children’s book. She just didn’t get to do that, and she always felt like she would have more time later. After she died, I felt so determined to finish the album on my terms, to really hold a strong vision for what I wanted out of these songs and make it happen. It gave me–I don’t know if I would call it confidence–but I felt really strongly about asserting myself as a producer and shaping these songs into what I was hoping for them to be. That was definitely the driving force for the last year of recording and as we mixed and mastered the album, and I also felt that energy with a lot of other aspects of the album, like the cover shoot and stuff like that.
There’s a lot of grief in the album, but I didn’t want it to be a ton of sad songs, so that was a little bit of a challenge for myself. But, for me, music is about connecting with other people, and I am basically saying “Okay, I feel this feeling sometimes, do you?” Just sort of putting that question out there. I know that not everyone has experienced a close loss or a pet loss or mental health issues or whatever things that I have experienced, but I do think that there are emotions at the core of all of these things that we can all identify with in some way, so I think of this album’s theme as sort of reaching out a hand to everybody who’s listening and being like “Will you take it?”
AA: That’s a nice sentiment. I think it comes through in the album, and opening with a song like “Follow Me” definitely establishes that thesis. We’ve talked a little about the collaboration that went into making this album and the personal development in terms of healing from the vocal injury and the guitar playing. How did the creation process behind the album reflect how your real life looked as well during those years?
KD: I will say, 2020, we recorded right before the pandemic. We did the basic tracks of drums and bass, which I’m so grateful we were able to do because the rest of the album was recorded in my partner’s band’s studio, so we were able to keep going there, even in the early days of the pandemic when nobody really knew what was really okay. We were able to go into our own space, and I am just so grateful for that, the album would not have been done by now if we didn’t have that! But, time sort of felt like it stopped then, and it gave us this space to really experiment. I am a much better guitar player than I used to be, though I’m still not a pro, but it still felt really awesome to have this safe space to take my time to record my guitar parts because I felt like I needed to be the one to do them. That was so much work that went into becoming a stronger player.
We also had our dog Quincy, who we got a few days before we did the first recordings. He was a retired racing greyhound, and he was just a very, very traumatized creature. He could not really be around other people, other dogs, could barely stand to be around us for a long time, and he came with us to almost every recording session for the whole year. We called him “Quincy Bones” like Quincy Jones! [laughs] We only had him for two years, he ended up having a bunch of serious health issues. We started recording right after we got him and finished recording right after he died, so I wanted to name the album after him. He’s in every picture from the recording process.
An image of Kimaya’s dog Quincy
But yeah, it was all a collaborative process with lots of experimentation, which I’m very grateful for.
AA: That feeling of things always being there but having to let go of them anyway seems to be a very present one in the album, too, right?
KD: Yeah, definitely. I have found myself, especially since my mom died, just so attached to the cycle of nature. My mom died in the Spring on Mother’s Day, so I obviously felt so horrible, but that week was the week when all the flowers started blooming and the weather was getting better, and I was like “This is not right! It should be snowing or raining!” But, ultimately, I was grateful that that was the time of year that we lost her because just seeing that the world continues to move, that the flowers will bloom and that the winter will come and then the flowers will bloom again… It all just keeps going whether you’re ready or not, and that was something that really kept me going every day. I think you see themes of that cycle throughout a lot of the songs.
AA: That must’ve been hard. I can’t imagine.
KD: It was a wild year. I mean, honestly, she died in 2021, and we were in a little pod before that, and she wasn’t really conditioned to be going out and about anyways. 2020 was the worst year for so many people, but it was actually a very special year for me because we had this dog, we were recording, and I got to spend a lot of time with my mom, since I wasn’t working. Everything was just kinda on pause, and that was a really special capsule moment.
AA: 2020 was definitely unique in how it allowed us to all stop for a moment.
KD: And I got to learn more about my mom’s goals, like wanting to write the children’s book and stuff like that. She was a dancer, so she would always be like “I want to dance at your shows, but all of the songs are super slow and sad!” So, I was definitely thinking a lot about her when I was writing these songs, thinking like “I can write a sad song that’s still danceable!”
She and my dad met at a dance party. She went to Bryn Mawr, and he went to Haverford, and there were life-long dance people.
AA: You got the full Tri-Co!
KD: Yeah! I live in the five college area in Western Mass., and I love the collaboration between the schools. I knew I wanted to have a similar thing but not stay here [in MA]. Like, I don’t really want to run into my parents in town.
AA: Well, I will say that the tracks are very groovy, so danceable sad songs have been accomplished.
Onto some more specifics, your first album was released in 2018, so it’s been five years now, which is a really long time. How would you say this album is markedly different from Breastfed? What are some themes from Breastfed that you think you comment on in Quincy?
KD: I think the first big difference is that I actually know how the recording process works this time around. I was just figuring it out the first time, and there are some choices that you can make early on that you can’t undo later, so I would make those kinds of choices for my first album. In terms of themes, Breastfed was a lot about my mom’s illness, she had breast cancer, and, while she was sick, she didn’t actually want anyone to know that she had cancer. She had breast cancer for 12 years, and none of her friends knew. Only close family knew. I was still writing about that experience in Breastfed, but I couldn’t be explicit about it, since she wanted it to be private, and now, in this album, there are a couple of songs like “Letting Go” and “I Thought You’d Choose Me” where I feel a little freer to be a little more open about specifically what I’m talking about. It was approaching a lot of that grief subject matter in a more direct way, which was very exciting to do.
The cover of Kimaya’s debut, Breastfed, from https://kimayadiggs.bandcamp.com/album/breastfed
AA: What about the structure of [Quincy]? You open with “Follow Me” and “Bloom,” which are hopeful and bright in themes, followed by “No Way No How” in the middle as a sort of lowkey angry song, then with the sadness of the latter half before summing it all up with “Rainbow” as another optimistic end. How did the structure of the album come to be? Was the flow natural as you made the songs?
KD: This was actually the fourth draft order. At first, I wanted to have a bunch of contrast, with a more energetic song, then a sadder song, then back and forth. But, it felt a little bit like whiplash, so I went back to my musical theater roots. I was thinking that, if all of these songs were telling one story, what was the arc that best captured what I was trying to say. Something like “Bloom,” which is a lot more optimistic - it just didn’t feel genuine to end on that high note. And I really like “Rainbow” because it’s a little bittersweet and the actual instrumentation sort of trails out and fades out, like, to me, that needed to be the end, while “Follow Me” had to be the beginning. I wasn’t completely sure how to get from point A to point B, but I do see it all as one continuous narrative, so that’s how I ended up with that song order.
AA: Were there any songs that you wrote for the album that you didn’t include?
KD: I did have a couple that got cut. When I started writing these songs, I wasn’t really thinking that they were going to become an album. There were definitely more of the slow, sad songs that got cut, and a couple of the songs on the album just really, really changed from what they were before, like “I Hafta Try” and “Rainbow” and even “Bloom,” those songs sound really different from how they started.
AA: What do you want your listeners to take away from the album once it’s released?
KD: I would say… I was so inspired by just so many incredible artists before me, and I hope that this can be a part of that lineage in a way. I’ve also been living with this “do what you want” attitude for a little while, and, you know, I worked hard to make this album what it is, but I was also figuring it out as I went, and I hope that when people listen to it, they just hear the love behind it. I hope that it can inspire people to write songs, too. You can really start out with iPhone demos in your dorm room.
AA: Well, I definitely felt the love. Some tangential Swarthmore-related questions for fun: What was your Swat experience like? What did you study?
KD: I would say, overall, my experience was a bit challenging, haha. I was struggling with mental health a lot for one of the first times in my life, so it was really hard trying to figure out what the hell was going on. But, I studied creative writing, and I also did a ton of music. I called myself almost a music major but not. They did a 150th anniversary opera that Nat Anderson and somebody else in the Music department wrote, and I got to be in that opera, which was really, really awesome. Both the music department and the English department were also really supportive of me doing creative things. I still think of so many of the people there as people who set me on a certain path like Craig Williamson, Nat Anderson, Debra Scurto-Davis… just so many of the people there really nurtured me as an artist. In every dorm I lived in, they would call me “the ghost” because I was always at rehearsal, always for something.
AA: You just had dedication! How would you say your post-Swat experience has been? What has led you up to the music-making process?
KD: Stepping into the world after graduation is scary, but I have to say that it is so much better. People said that to me, and I was like “Okay…” but I cannot stress it enough. For a long time, I was playing, like, 150 shows a year and paying my rent with that, which was awesome. Post-Swat, I was delving into a lot of different aspects of music. For a long time, I was a choral director at a school and teaching private lessons, which was a different way of engaging with music that was ultimately not for me. But, I’m really glad I had the opportunity to do that, and I love all the kids that I had as students and connecting with the families. Being in a school setting was just not it. To build a musical community was also cool. The musical community in Western Mass. is really reciprocal, really talented, always looking out for each other. When I first graduated and moved back here, I was like “I wish I knew people who would be in my band, I wish I knew people who could do a photoshoot with me or could make a music video with me,” and now I have that and it feels really incredible.
AA: Do you have any words for any aspiring musicians on campus?
KD: I would say just do what you can with what you have. The song “Bus Stop” on my first album, I truly recorded that using an 8-track app on my phone. I wouldn’t put that out necessarily at this point, but I might’ve then. I spent a lot of time as a musician thinking “I don’t have this” or “I don’t have that,” and there’s nothing wrong with dreaming of what you’re able to do, but there’s nothing better than making something with what you have, and it’s possible to make something you’re really proud of with that!