Meet Sarah Kinsley, the singer using fantasy worlds in music to tackle grief

It’s a universal experience, the idea of running away and refusing to face reality during times of grief and loss. But where all we differ is the way we choose to find this place of escapism.

For New York singer Sarah Kinsley, that refuge came in music – and channelling her experiences into a stunning debut album. Escaper, which arrives next month, sees Kinsley deliver bold and cinematic pop music framed around the idea of fantasy worlds where grief can’t reach.

There’s huge alt-pop moments throughout, but Kinsley’s classical education allows each song to arrive with its own epic edge too. You can read our full Q&A with Sarah Kinsley below.

We’re speaking roughly a month before Escaper is out. How does it feel knowing that your debut album is about to arrive?

It’s very new to me just because I’ve never released an album before. I’ve done releases but it’s like riding a bike with another wheel. I understand how this works and we’ve released music before, but it’s entirely new and there’s so many new stories to tell and there’s a deeper narrative with the album too. It’s really strange.

What is that deeper narrative? You’ve spoken before about creating worlds within your music…

It’s come to me recently, but I experienced a lot of grief and a lot of loss over the course of the time that I was writing and producing the album. I call myself ‘the escaper’ as I really became that thing. It became an odyssey of this character who is trying to run away from grief and loss and creating these imaginary worlds as part of that. But at the same time, the language I’ve been using to reflect these portals, it suggests that you don’t have to deal with anything that’s real when you escape. And throughout the album, I understand that it’s not really sustainable.

This character, whether it’s me or the person who escaped, slowly realises that and knows that there’s no way to escape grief or loss, you just have to go through it. I think that the decision of coming back to the world, with all of its depths and flaws, is the journey I’ve gone through personally. It feels like a very apt title.

There’s that moment on the album where you say that things will get better. Are you still an optimist even after experiencing these moments of loss?

I think I am a true optimist because you can’t really believe in fate or love, it’s hard to believe in a lot of those things when you’re a pessimist.

I think that grief and any form of heartbreak or loss can really shove you into a place where you just don’t feel like it makes any sense for the world to keep moving when it’s possible for humans to feel such horrible things. Even if you’re religious, if you’re spiritual, you feel so much anger, like, ‘how could you let this happen’?

That song, ‘Beautiful Things’, still focuses on this idea that it’s still worth being alive to experience these things. The pain of losing people doesn’t amount to the pain if you hadn’t known them. If I accepted pessimism, I would not understand anything about the world. Everything would like crumble and fall to pieces, like that scene in Inception where DiCaprio is looking at the world and it’s falling to pieces. I would feel that way.

You mentioned Inception – were there any other popular culture touchstones that may have informed your music?

Yeah, I was really thinking about this one quote from Past Lives. That is a film that has really mastered the complexity of loss. There’s that one point in the film where the three of them are sitting at the bar and one of the main characters is sitting at the bar and she is speaking in Korean with her childhood best friend and they clearly have so much love for each other and her American husband obviously can’t understand their conversation, which is already a tragic thing.

The husband also has that moment where he says “who you are is someone who leaves”. I sobbed profusely at that and I felt it very deeply while making Escaper, because I think like a lot of the time, grief is also forgiveness too, like I can allow my image of you to like fully reset or fully be its own thing.

You were classically trained but you’ve moved over to mainstream music. When did that change occur?

Honestly, I have to give all credit to radio when I was growing up. It’s different now obviously, but I remember when Spotify was first introduced and I remember what my life was like before that growing up in Singapore and American pop music was massive. I loved listening to the radio and introduced in a way that was so natural. But I’ve been doing classical music my whole life and I’ve played in orchestras, so I didn’t want to let go of that. Maybe it’s the selfish child in me!

It comes across in your music. There’s a real epic scope to it…

It’s just intrinsic to who I am as a person and the way I think because it’s so technical and it’s really perfect but there’s so much emotion in playing, it’s such a personal thing to do. I just love that orchestras are coming back too. I’ve seen videos of orchestras at festivals and raves and it just makes me so happy because I always thought when I was younger that the worlds were so binary and I always thought that you could never do both.

There’s just something so wonderful that if we’re able to combine sound and foster this great bridge between the two genres.

What about an orchestra at your live shows?

Well I’d love to but I definitely can’t afford that! The last show we did in New York, we had this really fun idea. I brought a sampler pad and a mic and we sampled the audience when we went on tour. We had 600 people sing a note and then we could sample it immediately and it was so much fun and it’s this really awesome, spiritual connection to have with an audience because it’s like you’re actually embedded into the set.

And finally, has creating this album allowed you to draw a line of sorts under your grief?

I feel finality in the sense that it’s a closing of a chapter. But I definitely don’t feel finality in terms of what I’m talking about. I’ve been feeling so cyclical throughout this whole process.

I think again about the people I wrote about, I think about these songs and how they’ve existed for me throughout the past year and a lot of them have to do with this very sad and beautiful thing. Every beginning has an end; every end has a beginning, right? But I’m just really fucking proud of this album, I really am.