The independent genre-less/bending musician and producer Emmett Kai has recently released his third album, Whale Milk. Whale Milk is a transcending 11-track album that possesses this youthful, innocent, alluring, imaginative story that was formulated out of the idea of an honest liberation of artistry. The album brings you on a sonically and visually complex listening experience from the vast layers that are heard throughout each song as it plays with production, music genres, music eras, and storytelling.
I was lucky enough to sit down as I dived deeper into Kai’s imagination and mind as we chatted about the creation process of Whale Milk.
(This interview was conducted in person and has been edited for clarity.)
You recently came out with an album, Whale Milk, which has a clear and concise image throughout from the imagery, sound, and titles. I want to ask, what is Whale Milk? How did you come up with it? What does it mean?
Whale Milk is something that I heard in passing. I’ve always been into off-the-cuff, kind of wacky stuff. It stuck with me for a while and then I did some research and learned that there were a lot of people trying to capitalize off of whale milk from back in the late 1800s and early 1900s and trying it out because they thought it would be viable. I internalized it and thought it would be a great name for my next album because I hadn't put out an album since 2020 and I compiled all these songs and wrote all these songs and felt that it fit the music. Then the artwork came last and the artwork tied it all up.
While creating the album, did you know this was the story/ image you wanted for the album or did that come later?
Music/ anybody's creative work has this tendency to be one thing for them and then something else for other people. It takes on its own life after it's put out. I think for me there wasn't a story there except for me to capture the overall place that I was in that part of my life. For context, I was living in upstate New York, bouncing between Brooklyn and Upstate, and I was in a relationship. I had not written an album for three-plus years and I am a huge fan of Frank Zappa, Ariel Pink, and older music from the 60s and the 70s and all of this was just cultivating in its way in this studio that I had. If there was a story, that's great, but it was not intentionally put together that way and it makes me happy that somebody could feel there is.
What did your writing process look like? Was it more intentional or something that flowed out of you?
I would sit down and this is where the story idea comes in because I do think of albums as albums before I write them. I think about what I would want to listen to as a listener such as asking myself how I would want the album to flow through. Even though this album is very schizophrenic and all over the place, that's where I was at the time. I was all over the place and unraveled in a lot of ways. On paper, I was grounded at the time because I had this very slow life, a very chill post-pandemic life that ultimately came back at me at the end of all of it but it is a great portrayal of where I was in my life. I sat down and I told myself “I want to write weird stuff,” I wanted to scratch that itch.
I read that with this album, you wanted to release your imagination, your creativity, and have this album be for you. What did the creation of this album look like? How was it different from your previous works since you didn’t have to think about doing it for someone else?
How you ended that question is perfect because I've never been signed to a major label nor have I ever had any attention from major labels. But I think that growing up writing music throughout my 20s and thinking of it as this career and having the mentality of “I want to get followers, traction, etc.” It led me to hitting this point where I'm 31 and I've been doing this my whole life. I've had success in a lot of different ways that I feel most people don't see from the lens that you usually see success through. With Whale Milk and this chapter of my music, I put that behind me, I was done with that. I have had a publishing deal, I work on records for other artists, and I produce a lot of music for other people who are trying to grow and capitalize off of their art. I felt as if I was in this domestic partnership where I could write music for fun, I can have fun with this, and I don't have to think about what's going to trend or I don't have to think about an intro of a song being 10 seconds for it to blow on TikTok or anything such as that. That's why the first song in the album is around six minutes long and the vocals don't come in for a minute. I could do what I wanted to do and that's where I fell on this album.
Were there any moments during the process of creating this album that were memorable?
Looking back on the process of writing this album was interesting because a lot of this process went in waves, a lot of things happened in the making of this album. I pulled some songs from 2017 on this album such as the song Teenage River which is from 2017 and the song Mastercard Lithuania is from 2017/2018. Those songs I wrote when I had just moved to New York from California. That was around the time when I was new to New York, living in a little shoebox, and had very minimal stuff and I made those songs and sat on them for a while. Those were some of my favorite moments of writing the album. My life has changed so much since writing the album and I look back on the album almost as a necessary step to take for me to get to the next step. I'm very proud of it and I'm very proud of how it all came together.
I would say that between being able to write the whole record, except for those songs, in this beautiful remote setting in the mountains of upstate New York, I was grateful for that and grateful for my friend Anthony for renting me that cabin. I also met one of my best friends right before I started writing the album. Her name is Jordana. I had just finished producing her next record in the same room where I worked on this album and I think that there was a lot of crossover there; a lot of feeding off of her energy and feeding off of writing her album. We would write her album and then when she would leave, I would write my songs so I think there was a lot of cross-pollinating going on between those two projects. I loved being able to connect with the artist who did the artwork for the album too which meant a lot to me because he's known me since I was a kid. He's older than I am and it felt necessary for me to reconnect with him as an adult and to be able to collaborate with him on this record.
The album feels defining to you, your timeline, and where you were during that point in your life such as moving to New York and then working on it in upstate New York. Do you think the environments you were in while creating this album affected the way you created the album from being from California, moving to New York, and then going to upstate New York?
I think so. The two songs that I wrote in Brooklyn in 2017, those songs captured this young-spirited energy of me feeling free, innocent, not having any baggage or anxiety, throwing caution to the wind, and writing for fun. Then when I started writing this album and then circled back to those songs when I was upstate, I thought “What a fun spirit to have,” and I wasn't in that spirit when I was writing this album or rather in that phase of my life where the album started coming together. I tried to tap into that a bit with my studio. I had this big studio and I furnished it all myself, spent all this money on all this gear, and built it out and it felt like a dream come true. It only lasted a year and I was creatively stuck and wanted to find something that felt good. I think that feeling came from writing these funny songs and having a little bit of humor in them. Not that it's a comedy album at all, but having a little bit of humor in there and having beauty in there, there's fun, there's sadness, and there's a love song. I was inspired by all these different records that I wanted to tap into that innocent nature again which hopefully I can keep going forever.
Who creatively influences you and who are the others that influenced this album?
There are a lot of musicians that I look up to and listen to, that I am obsessed with, that influence my writing. I think it's much more important to say that I find a lot of my community inspiring. I think that my best friends, people who have known me since I was a kid, and who have supported me are important and inspiring to me because I've had a very unorthodox life and I chose abnormal routes in my life and I think it's incredible to me that everybody has supported me throughout that, emotionally, creatively, and sometimes even financially.
They say don't make music or art based on what people are going to think about it which I agree with, although it helps me to think about my friends, my family, and the local people from my hometown that I've become so close with while making music. A lot of the time I'll finish a song and I'll think about somebody who I love and say this song for them. I could even think about my uncle Jordy and remember how he was the one who showed me the Smiths and I’d dedicate a song to him in that regard. It helps me feel like I have some purpose in writing and it's not directionless.
There is a sense of vulnerability in your songs not just through what you’re writing about but through the people who may have inspired it, each song is attached to a time in your life or someone important in your life. Do you ever find it difficult to create/ release music that's heavily attached to who you are?
No, I don't find it difficult. My friend, Kristina Esfandiari has this project called King Woman and has a lot of other projects but that's one of her main projects. I remember showing her some of my music before I had ever released anything and she said “Oh my God, you need to put this out” and I told her “I couldn’t. I’m not a vocalist. I’m not a singer” and she had said “Well you are now and you might as well just do it because what are you going to do? Never put it out?” I do sit on a lot of music but me being vulnerable with my music is the only thing that I have. I'm not a public speaker. I'm not a writer like I'm not going to write a book, I might one day but I'm not right now. This is all that I have which is why I want to honor it and respect the fact that I have this now. Some people don't have a way to express themselves or they spend their whole life looking for a way to express themselves and it's great that people see the vulnerable aspect of my music but I also have to recognize that my lyrics and way of storytelling is pretty avant-garde which is most fun for me.
There is a huge visual element from what you hear such as the outside noise you hear in Felta Creed Survival Camp and even through the visual elements such as the cover art that create this journey/ path throughout the album. What was the journey you wanted to take listeners on?
I think that it is visual. I believe that my music is super visual for me when I make it. The journey that I wanted to take people on is this literal audible journey of my imagination and my brain in that moment of my life as a way to capture time/time frame. I wanted it to be this phantasmal joyous trip down memory lane that feels both haunting and comfortable. I wanted it to be technical but also very simple and I wanted to play with juxtaposition with this album which is where I feel the album is at.
There are a lot of elements that come into every song that make it a complex listening experience as you keep discovering different sounds beyond the lyrics and instruments in them. Did you find any hardships in the production/ mixing process or throughout any process of creating this album?
One of the biggest hardships was when I mixed and mastered the entire album onto tape first which I thought was going to be a fantastic idea. It took me months and once I finished it, I realized I didn’t like it. Then I had to go back and redo it all, which I then finished all digitally even though a lot of the stuff on there is tape, I finished it digitally and that was my hardship. Another hardship, as I previously mentioned, when I write I envision my friends, family, and people closest to me enjoying this album and there were moments when I would slip into this mentality of feeling that nobody's going to like it, and with this album, I wanted to write this album not caring about that and I wanted it to be more for me. I had to get through that and ultimately I am proud of the album.
How did you combat that mentality? Especially since those are hard mental spaces to get out, especially as an artist/ creative.
I don't have anything to lose. I don't have a record deal. I don't have sponsorship deals. I don't have a manager. I don't have an agent. I do have a publicist, Willa but ultimately I don’t have anything to lose. With my first LP, Baby Hits! It was organic and I wrote it in Brooklyn and it was the first album that did well for being unsigned, just an independent artist in New York. It reached a lot of people and I didn’t have a team behind me. Then I did Freak Pop Novelty which was another piece of work where I wanted to do something different. Both Freak Pop Novelty and Baby Hits! are completely different albums and they don’t even sound like the same person except for my voice on it and then that led to Heaven in Heat which is again different from my previous works. What's interesting is that Heaven in Heat started the idea of Whale Milk. I was originally going to put Heaven in Heat on Whale Milk but it ended up being a disaster of a transfer. So then I did Whale Milk separately to continue on that nostalgic throwback vintage sound that I've been loving and wanting to do. I have finished Whale Milk and now I’m into different sounds and something different than the sounds you hear in Whale Milk. I see a lot of artists do this one path marketing train throughout their whole career and I think that's fantastic but I can't do that. If I did do that I would just be starting all these other side projects because I would want to make so much and play around with different sounds.
Would you say your music evolves with you?
I think that music evolves with me. I try not to think about it too much. I try to let it happen and I don't try to fight it. Whenever I want to make something, I just try to make it. I trust my intuition that something will strike the right chord and then that could result in an album or an EP or something smaller or larger. I let my heart do the talking.
What's next for you? Are you already moving with a new sound or different direction for your future projects?
Yes, I'm working on a lot of electronic music and I don't want to speak too soon because I don't have anything super set in stone. I've been listening to a lot of music again and feeling super inspired. I've been loving Chanel Beads and Mount Kimbie, who have always been one of my favorite projects and their new album is so good. I also moved across the country again, back to California with very limited space and I don't have a studio anymore which is why I have to make do with what I have. I'm doing the best that I can and it's limited so I'm falling back into more electronic/ computer music, not so much big studio material.
You wanted to create music that was for you in an industry where that liberty is hard to gain, has working on this album changed you artistically?
Writing Whale Milk was the first time I broke the seal of thinking about the industry while writing an album. Whether you are a new artist, a bigger artist, or a smaller artist you’ll always think about the industry and I think going against that is what is best for you. I look at people such as Charlie XCX who went on a roller coaster of a career and has paved the way. She's pop but she has paved the way for her mind to take over the driver's seat. Yes, she has a great team behind her and a good network but the same goes for people that don't have a huge team. For example, Chanel Beads signed with Jagjaguwar which is great but it doesn't sound as if they did because their album sounds very avant garde which is refreshing to see an album of that style become successful in the way that it has.
What do you want people to take away from Whale Milk?
I want people to feel like you're not always going to be in the best position to write your best work. I want people to feel free, creatively, such as if one person listens to this album and walks away from it, with their seal broken and they say “I'm going to go home and write” and they write an album from one song or the album and it inspires them to do something that they were afraid to do, would be incredible. I can't expect people to feel inspired by the album at all but it would be incredible if even one person felt inspired in that way.
Interviewed by Veronica Anaya
