Thoughts about my song 'ASAP'

Imagine me four floors up in an apartment a few blocks from Bourbon St. in New Orleans.  It’s hot and humid.  There are random thunderstorms so lightning bangs through the windows every twenty minutes; I’m lost in my headphones.  Between takes I can hear street performers blowing tubas and trumpets and banging drums from The French Quarter.  I’m standing at the kitchen bar because the apartment doesn’t have a desk – and I’m composing what would become ‘ASAP’; it’s 1AM.  I’m making a new song in a new place with a new little traveling piano on the first self-motivated trip I’d ever taken in my life.  When I told my parents about this traveling album, Made In / Place, they responded with what I’d describe as fear.  There’s something about this – for me specifically – that is radically new.

I have largely been a creature of habit and discipline throughout my adult life.  Anything outside of creating music and finding a means to promote or make a living from that music I viewed as my squandering minutes that could have been better allocated.  And once I made it to some degree of creative success, any minute not spent in service of that creativity was my taking my eye off the ball.  This – this, though – this I am doing to enrich my soul – because when you live with such tremendous focus on a single expression of yourself, you are bound to sacrifice branches of your tree that would have otherwise grown.  This is me looking at an unexplored area of my own heart, and the unexplored map of this world, and seeing if maybe when I combine them both I’ll find pieces of myself hidden within experiences I would have never had – new branches that, had I not decided to do this, would’ve been left trimmed as “not me”.  There’s a tendency to find a lane in life and stay there.  We find our way to a comfortable version of ourselves and announce “this is me,” and anything outside of that version is not.  I think to audit where you are on that spectrum, and then decide to live in a way opposite or different from what you consider to be “you” is an important part of self-discovery.  My committing to this project is an expression of that idea. 

Look at your lifestyle biases.  If you’re a measurer, a list-maker, a sharp edge – I’d seek an avenue to express your softness.  If you are laid back, an it’s-whatever-er, a round edge – I’d seek a tougher road.  If I were a social person, I’d find quiet.  If I were an active person, I’d find stillness.  If I were a list-maker, I’d surrender to my whims.  If I were a traveler, I’d stay home.  Because if you’re a chronic expression of one idea of living, the probability that you are also an expression of fear is high – even if your behaviors might externally signal perfection.  Sometimes the person who is chronically social is scared of being alone, for example.  Sometimes the person who is chronically at the gym is deeply insecure.  Sometimes the person who is obsessed with their health is intensely afraid of death.  These resulting behaviors aren’t bad, but to be motivated by anxiety is to be imprisoned by it – regardless of what direction that anxiety moves you.  My goal is to discover all fears that animate my actions because with that discovery the chains they have on me loosen; I can feel it happen; and then they unbind, and with them finally unbound I can truly live fearlessly, and decide fearlessly, and know myself fearlessly.  Fear will make you love someone you’d never love, work where you’d never work, and be what you’d never be – for a lifetime.  To unbuckle fear from your decision-making is to take the mud from your eyes and see your life and yourself for what they are.

I quit drinking over thirteen years ago, and that decision was similarly motivated.  Anyone who knew me before then would’ve thought I’d never say no to a beer at party.  And on the other side of that decision, a decision that didn’t “seem like Kai” to those who knew me at the time, was a level of peace and healing I’d have never achieved.  To seize opportunity at the nightclub I once worked for and move beyond punching numbers into excel spreadsheets, I had to move from an ‘introverted’ expression of myself – to an ‘extroverted’ one – because the job required I introduce myself to and build rapport with hundreds of guests every weekend, sober.  My doing that did not “seem like Kai”, yet on the other side of that were skills I would have never developed or known existed, and friends I would have never met.  When I decided to write my first pop songs ‘Friction’ and ‘Hurricane’, that did not “seem like Kai” and yet they became two of the most popular songs in my discography – the latter of which climbing to #2 in the world on Spotify’s Global Viral Chart establishing a foundation for my music career.  When I moved to San Francisco, it didn’t “seem like Kai”.  When I started eating healthfully it didn’t “seem like Kai”.  When I broke up with a girlfriend who treated me very poorly – her first words to me while I was breaking up with her were, “ – you don’t seem like yourself.”  Good.  “Man, Kai, this new song just doesn’t seem like you.”  Good.  “I just don’t get why you’d write something like this.”  Good.  “I just don’t get why you’re traveling alone.”  Good.  I hope the road of my life is strewn with the empty shells I’ve escaped from by choosing growth over sameness.  From the knives I’ve pulled from my ribs I’ve built the ladders I've needed to reach some kind of higher self – a freer self – a self not beholden to whatever fears would’ve kept me passed out drunk in an alley in Fairfield as the sun came up, or fears that would've kept me in a nightclub accounting department, or fears that would've kept me within the prison of a self so underdeveloped that I can look back now and say, ah, that - that wasn't me; I was just on my way.

‘ASAP’ is a song I’d never written about a lifestyle I’d never lived made in a city I’d never been.  It’s a celebration of newness – an ode to adventure.  It’s a song about discovering and embracing the other side of your coin.

And it’s also about whatever you think it’s about, because that’s music.

Kai Straw

About the song ‘ASAP’, 2024

Miami II: The Orchid to the Moonflower

I’m writing this at 8:16PM in Miami.  My second stop as I make an album around the world.

I just got back to my place.  It was windy and grey today and even though it looks like winter, the water was the perfect temperature.  I couldn’t help but stay in.  The sun was going down, the sky was glowing silver, and the wind caused the waves to grow bigger and more violent – there were no others in the water but me for as far as I could see; and I understood why.  With each crash, the waves pushed and pulled and pushed and pulled, harder and harder and harder – until I was knocked over.  I found myself underwater dragged by the ocean.  I thought, “ – so this is how this goes.”  I can imagine – had I been drunk, had I been deeper, had I not planted my heel into the sand – I’d have been forced to contend with just how indifferent nature can be, how borrowed and brief my life has been, and how a final moment feels when its stripped away slowly by exhaustion.

The more I live, the more I understand how fragile this life is, and the less the weight of the world steals the lightness from my soul.  “Look upon my works and despair,” we can say, consumed with some daily drama while all we’ve owned or made will be taken by the weeds.  I continue to aim to be a present expression of my curiosity and skill – for their own sake.  Each song is written for its own sake.  Each word is written for its own sake.  Each conversation is had for its own sake.  Anything I build or create is an expression of my authentic self – a natural unfolding of the code embedded in me – and whatever happens outside of me because of it is like the bee that unknowingly passes pollen from the orchid to the moonflower.  I am not an expression of expectations implanted in me, nor external waypoints set by others, nor anxieties learned by trauma or games of status or fame or envy.  My loyalty is to the grip of my own hand on what tools best align with the contours of my soul to create and involve myself with whatever architecture best matches the unique runes that are etched into the unseen structure that animates me.  The only failure that I fear is the betrayal of my self – which is to leave my gifts unexpressed, my curiosities unexplored, and my bulb in whatever ways mal-bloomed.

I met a songwriter named Sabrina here.  We spent a day together.  She told me she wrote a song so dark she had to ask, “ – how could I think that about myself?”  As she recalled the question, her eyes welled with tears, and it seemed like she was also asking me.  It’s the first time in my life I’ve talked to someone who knew what that was like.  We can hide things from ourselves when writing prose but something about a song – the melodies make us more vulnerable maybe – or the process is so inherently intuitive, so uninhibited, that our actual selves – our deepest selves – slip into the song without our permission; like a snake-charmer to the cobra, the process calms our ego and allows our hidden truths to seep out – and just because we discover them doesn’t mean they sting any less.  Hearing her recognize this, and seeing the depth behind her eyes as she expressed it to me, has become one of my favorite moments in any conversation I’ve had.  I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.  And it never would have happened had I not come here.

The sun slowly came up as I walked down Miami Beach.  There were sheds full of beach chairs being unloaded, hundreds of them, maybe thousands.  The ground started showing footprints and tire marks the closer I got to South Beach, the tourist hub of Miami.  Very few people were on the beach so early, but the footprints and tread marks were like some forewarning – temporary hieroglyphs that told of the millions and millions of people who have come here every day, every year, and of the thousands who would arrive only hours from then.  It’s like I could see their ghosts – like I could somehow compress every moment ever experienced on that beach and I could see locals and tourists from the ‘70s near those from the ‘80s and ‘90s and so on – all in my mind’s eye, more alike than different, arriving to play at the beach together while skyscrapers towered above them; hives built by the human instead of the honeybee.

My mind then took me to the devastation happening in the unseen parts of the world, and our histories of violence, and to all of the souls that have been set loose in the name of conquest or expansion or survival.  The contrast helped me even better appreciate the side of the coin I was walking across – what an oasis, what a tremendous victory of cooperation and community.  From behind one of those skyscrapers a cruise ship crawled over the horizon, another gargantuan structure – many times larger than the Titanic.  I was then swept away by the magnitude of our accomplishments as a species.  We pass along our thoughts with sound.  We’ve constructed languages of symbols to understand the fabric of the universe.  To be cynical about our humanness is to be willingly blind to the depth of drive, intelligence, and courage inherent to us.  I was reminded of this and felt a fire in my chest.  My mind took me from our painting on cave walls, to our first crude structures, to the wheel, to mathematics, to the telescope, to the car, to the internet, to our entire interconnected world of cultures and organizations and technologies, separate but dependent; the gravity of our collective story was so exciting to me it almost felt like I’d float away.

Kai Straw

Miami, 2024

Miami: Two Worlds, Braided

I’m writing this at 9:33PM in Miami.

On my first morning here I woke up at 5:00AM and saw the Atlantic Ocean for the first time in my life while an orange sun lifted into a clear sky.  I walked down Miami Beach until my fingers got swollen.  I tried a Cubano (a Cuban sandwich), Rabo Encendido (Cuban oxtail stew), a deconstructed cake (which is an inside-out cake in a bowl), all for the first time – along with rib so tender the waitress slid the bone out from the middle before pulling it apart with just a pair of forks.  I visited a beekeeper and learned how the hive becomes aggressive; it’s because of their queen – the queen tells them all, tens of thousands in her hive, how to behave.  I asked, “ – how do you calm them down?”  Her accent was Cuban.  “You must kill her,” she said.

I’ve thought a lot about fear.  When confronted with something I’m afraid of, or makes me nervous, or gives me anxiety, I imagine the fear being a manifestation of my younger self, like it’s the voice of me at six years old.  In the theater of my heart, I take the hand of my younger self and I lead him to what he is afraid of.  United, as the father and son, we approach it together.  It’s like with this metaphor I can allow the fear to exist without judgment, and allow encouragement to exist, too.  Instead of just, “ – I don’t want to do this.”  There’s a rebuttal, “ – everyone is afraid; you get to decide whether that feeling is a prison or a calling.”  In this way – being afraid isn’t an impediment, it’s a test from my proud father.  In what makes me afraid I also see a loving hand.

When I stepped out of the airport I was greeted by a man with a black car and a thick Cuban accent; he sounded exactly like Al Pacino from Scarface.  “Where you going?”  No introduction.  No explanation.  Just the question and thick humidity.  The palm trees aligning the airport were screaming with birds that rushed from one tree to the next every few minutes.  “Miami Beach,” I said.  “Miyami-beesh, 70 doller,” he replied.  I took an uber instead.  My new driver said, with wide eyes looking at me through the rearview, “ – the Russians tried to kill my son.”  He was Columbian; I could hardly understand him, but I understood that.  I repeated the entire question.  “The Russians tried to kill your son?”  He replied, “ – jes-jes-jes-jes, I tell you.”  He talked fast and with his hands and he accidentally smacked the rosary beads hanging from his mirror.  Though I didn’t understand most of the story, he ended with, “ – Cubans are powerful.”  He said it with the type of pride and awe you reserve for a great grandfather you never met.

With the beekeeper, I used her tools and lifted a hive’s lid to expose the honeycomb panels.  On the underside of one of the lids, hundreds of large ants about the size of my pinky-nail were exposed swarming around the hive.  “Agh!”  She shouted.  She left briefly and returned with a blowtorch.  I threw the lid on the grass and she chased the ants with the burning blue spearhead; it roared and the ants glowed and popped as they were burned.  “Popcorn!”  She shouted.  She then explained how the ants don’t actually go inside the hive and they don’t hurt the bees; “ – they have an agreement,” she said, but not with her.

There are two worlds here, braided.  Everyone speaks Spanish and no one speaks Spanish – at the same time, brushing shoulders.  “I don’t speak big English,” said an older woman; her voice sounded like burnt leather, “ – I live here for ten year, everyone speak Spanish.”  Old Cuban men with their cigars and big thick-rimmed black glasses sit at street-side tables in Little Havana; they talk fast back and forth, ignoring the herds of tourists who are ignoring them, too, as they wear tropical shirts or polos or business casual suits or designer this or designer that or white shorts and flip-flops that clap funny when they walk.  The kid who cut my hair, 3-months new from Columbia, used shining golden combs; we could hardly understand each other, but the cut was perfect.

The cultures here haven’t combined as much as they’ve decided to dance together – separate bodies to the same rhythm.  Miami feels like a handshake between two people who are pretending to understand each other but don’t – but both do understand the sun, music, money, beauty, and good food – so those things are the common tongue, and I don’t say that cynically.  It’s like seeing oil and water separate and swirl, uncombined but beautiful in its disparate cohesion.  It’s sports cars and tourists and Cubans and Columbians and cigars and tight outfits and rich dads and poor dads and old European money and thunderstorms and graffiti and sunshine and art deco architecture and cockroaches and too much traffic and bright pink nails on old women and laughing as the waves hit you on a beach so warm it doesn’t matter if it’s grey out.  Miami is a sun-kissed twenty-dollar bill twisting through the wind, caught midair and slammed onto a beach-side bar.

Kai Straw

Miami, 2024