Hayley Kiyoko for Beats By Dre
Hayley Kiyoko has spent the past four years working towards her first headlining tour, but it almost didn’t happen. After a seemingly minor fall on her 25th birthday last year, Hayley ended up with a concussion and was subsequently diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome (PCS). What followed was a tough period as she struggled to keep her fledgling music career on the right path. “I’ve never been a tormented artist, but recovering from that was really hard.” Still, Hayley continued to push past her personal challenges in 2016 and released two self-directed music videos: “Gravel To Tempo” and “One Bad Night,” along with her major label debut EP, Citrine.
It’s been about a year since then, and it’s clear, sitting poolside in Austin, Texas between shows, that Hayley’s recovered from that literal stumble and is back in the driver’s seat after wrapping an ambitious, sold-out U.S. tour.
“In 2012 I was working on my first EP and I didn’t know what I was doing,” Hayley says with a laugh now. “It was kind of all over the place.” She kept grinding though, flying herself out to London to work with music producers, confident that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. “Beats [By Dre] was like my label before I was signed,” Kiyoko says of her time before breaking into the industry. She met with the company back in 2014, and not long after snagged a commercial campaign with the brand. “They were really supportive of my music even though I wasn’t signed. They validated me as an artist. They listened, and they didn’t care whether I was signed or not. They were just like, ‘This is dope, and we’re going to support you.’ I mean, that’s the best.” Since then the headphones and speakers company has been invested in the pop starlet’s career.
These days, it’s getting even brighter—Kiyoko has found a devoted audience online with her unique brand of soul-baring pop, and it’s grown fast. Finding the courage to get personal shifted things. “It’s totally changed my writing process because, up until before Citrine, I was trying to think of metaphors, and vague concepts. I used to tell stories that weren’t really my stories.”
She recalls being terrified the night before she released the music video for “Girls Like Girls.” When it dropped in June 2015, Kiyoko experienced her first brush with surging internet success. “I had never gotten a million views on any of my videos… I started to see the support, and I started to see there was a space for me in the industry to sing about girls. It was very freeing to be able to sing about what I was actually feeling as opposed to sugar-coating things, or trying to have my songs be more vague so people didn’t get confused.”
Later that year she signed to Atlantic Records.
Kiyoko makes something close to traditional, anthemic pop—“the music is catchy as hell,” she says—but it typically plays with a few elements that make it unique, and grabs you for a second, then third listen. It’s her personality and willingness to share what’s going on in her life, though, that’s won her most intense fans, and what pulls them from their phones and laptops to her actual shows. Kiyoko sold out her latest tour, no small feat for an artist on the rise. “I’m meeting all these young girls that are so inspired by my music,” she said. “I’ve created a blanket of comfort where they can listen to music and know that that’s 100% what they’re going through.”
Kiyoko uses details from her own life—namely navigating an attraction to other girls—on songs like “Sleepover” to forge that connection. “Growing up, for me, I’d listen to music, and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I can connect to this, but this is about a guy, or this is not exactly what I’m going through,’” she explained. Still, there’s more left to share. “A lot of my songs are about what I’ve been through, not what I’m going through,” she said. “Now that I’m free and I get to sing about whatever I want, I’m playing catch-up.”