When Bella Kay finally returned to in-person school following the COVID-19 pandemic, she had been learning remotely since the end of eighth grade, which could possibly be just as bad? – tried to find an activity similar to songwriting, which he started doing on his own at home when he was in high school.
“I was like, ‘I think I’m going to do theater,’” he recalls. “I wanted to get better at being on stage and looking better on stage. And honestly, it was really fun; I really got into the action and had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she thinks the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” hosted by Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role appearing in Reese Witherspoon’s movie? He burst into laughter at this thought.
“Brother, I was a sophomore,” he replies. “I was Community Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay stepping into the spotlight isn’t such a far-fetched idea: In April, “Iloveitiloveiloveit,” a taut pop-rock song about falling in love (and falling in love again) with a guy she knows is bad news, hit the top 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Grammy tipsters touted Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when the nominees were announced on Nov. 16. months ahead of time, will tour as the opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old actor will headline his own show Tuesday night at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, where he moved from Texas to pursue music after taking a brief break from college.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded safe, but then school got the best of me…” he says now. “I decided the universe was telling me this wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” became the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; Amid arrangements that blend funky singer-songwriter guitars with sombre synths and woozy programmed rhythms, Kay sings openly about sex and self-image, her close-miced vocals conveying both the pain of confession and a barbed sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I talk,” he says. “But when I’m writing and singing I’m more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say.'” This goes some way to explaining the surprising frankness of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which touches on Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what’s going in my mouth; whether it’s going to get in and how I can get it out,” he sings as he plays piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee one recent morning in Hollywood; He’s scheduled a studio session this afternoon, but after our chat we walk across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where he picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and Role Model’s “Kansas Anymore.” The singer loves Los Angeles, but says she “hasn’t quite figured out my work life here,” meaning the fine-grained understanding between “colleagues and colleagues.” friend “friends,” he expresses.
“I need to be locked in and know the difference. My job is to be particularly vulnerable, so I give people secrets – that’s who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, that doesn’t necessarily mean…” he adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. say, quote-unquote, ‘We’re best friends.’ So are you really going to be there?”
Kay, whose father is Black and mother is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her father drove her to school; Her first concert was Tori Amos’ show, which she went to with her mother. During COVID, Abrams delved deep into Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine; “These girls whose blood flows on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like almost everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the groundbreaking Taylor Swift has blazed. “I absolutely respect him; he’s a great songwriter,” he says. “But it always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could achieve that,” she adds, “compared to these familiar singer-songwriters who were just a girl in a room with her guitar. I was like, I can do this.”
And so he did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school started and he returned to musical theatre. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; Sometimes he even displayed them at school coffeehouse nights. “Do you know how to tell when someone is giving you an insincere compliment?” he asks. “A lot of people would say, ‘That’s nice,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After a troubled year at Texas A&M, Kay decided to post on TikTok again, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, attracting the attention of many managers and labels; Kay signed with Atlantic Records last year, and the label released “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (A&R rep Jeff Levin at Atlantic also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country singer behind the viral hit “Boston.”)
Kay produced “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of the relatively few female producers in the pop world. “On our fourth or fifth session, I said, ‘That’s my girl,’” Kay says. “He understands me; we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
Kay says the most difficult song to write on the album was its stripped-down version: “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write, but it was hard to reach,” he explains. He had recorded 12 songs and knew he wanted 13 songs on the album; He had another song called “I’m Ruining Everything” about “how I’m the worst and deserve every bad thing that happens to me.” “But I was in the studio and I was like, ‘This is so stupid, this isn’t right.’ A lot of things on this record are really self-destructive – like, ‘Oh my God, this girl hates herself,’ etc. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than feeling like that.”
Kay adds: “Two things can be true at the same time.”