DAREDEVIL
Chloe Kimes | Release Spotlight
Chloe Kimes has a fairly dramatic description of life as an independent musician.
Imagine climbing into a cannon.
Somebody lights the fuse.
Off you go.
And somewhere in the distance, hopefully, there's a reasonably soft place to land.
She's been doing a version of this for nearly a decade. Touring, writing songs, managing herself, paying for records and making a living in an industry that isn't particularly famous for providing financial security.
Then, on the morning of her final studio session, a word appeared in her head.
Daredevil.
There it was.
A name for the whole ridiculous business.
But the title of Kimes' second album describes something else too.
Because somewhere along the way, she had started taking a different kind of risk.
She began writing the things she was afraid to say.
And that turned out to be rather interesting.
THE THINGS WE DON'T SAY
There are plenty of ways to write a song.
You can start with a melody. A guitar riff. Something somebody said in a bar that sounded considerably wiser after the third drink.
Kimes began asking herself a different question.
What am I avoiding?
A thought that feels uncomfortable. An emotion that might upset somebody. Something that would be easier to leave out.
And then she would try writing towards it.
That became an important part of the process behind Daredevil, a twelve-song album released independently on October 16.
The songs don't follow one storyline. Kimes is quite clear about that.
They weren't all written about fear, either.
Fear was simply one of the things she began paying attention to when deciding where a song might go.
It's a subtle difference, but an important one.
Because once you stop avoiding the uncomfortable parts of an experience, all sorts of other things begin appearing.
Desire.
Joy.
Regret.
The occasional thought you might prefer your mother didn't hear.
And sometimes a line that surprises even the person who wrote it.
Kimes has become increasingly interested in that feeling of exposure.
She enjoys finding the thing that makes her slightly nervous to put into a song.
A peculiar hobby, perhaps.
But a useful one for a songwriter.
A LITTLE MYSTERY, PLEASE
One of the more interesting things about Kimes' approach is that she doesn't feel obliged to explain herself.
Her songs can be personal without being entirely autobiographical.
A detail might come from her own life. Another might be invented. A character might borrow something from somebody she knows.
She doesn't necessarily tell us which is which.
And why should she?
Kimes describes songwriting as a kind of protective curtain.
Behind it, she can say something deeply personal while leaving the listener uncertain about exactly what happened and to whom.
That freedom matters.
A song doesn't have to become a sworn statement.
And listeners have their own memories to bring to it.
Kimes prefers images and specific moments to explanations. She likes unusual language, particularly when it finds a fresh way into an experience everybody recognises.
The writer supplies the details.
The listener does some of the work.
That is a much more interesting arrangement than having every feeling carefully explained before the second chorus.
Across Daredevil, that philosophy gives the twelve songs room to exist as individual pieces rather than chapters in one predetermined story.
Thirty-nine minutes is enough.
She doesn't need to spend an hour proving the point.
SONGS WITHOUT A GUITAR
Kimes has another habit that tells you something about the way she writes.
She often leaves the instrument out of it.
No guitar.
No piano.
Just a melody, a line and whatever happens to be going on around her.
Walking works.
Driving works.
Ordinary life provides plenty of opportunities.
She keeps fragments of lyrics in her phone, sometimes returning to them much later and discovering that two unrelated ideas have something to say to each other.
For Kimes, her voice and her command of melody are the primary instruments.
The accompaniment can come afterwards.
That means she doesn't have to begin with whatever chord shapes happen to be comfortable under her fingers.
The melody gets to make its own decisions.
Take He Still Listens to the Radio, the album's opening track.
Kimes wrote the entire song during a solo drive from San Diego to Nashville.
Quite a productive journey.
Most of us would be pleased to arrive with a decent playlist and a reasonable amount of petrol remaining.
She arrived with a song.
It's a useful example of how naturally writing has become part of her everyday life.
The ideas don't always wait for a studio.
Sometimes they turn up somewhere along the interstate.
THE OTHER KIND OF DAREDEVIL
Of course, making the songs is only part of the story.
Somebody has to pay for the recordings.
Book the shows.
Get the band together.
Make sure the whole operation can continue next month.
And that somebody, quite often, is Chloe Kimes.
She has spent much of the past decade building her career outside the traditional label system.
Daredevil is entirely independently released.
There is no label advance providing a comfortable financial cushion.
The freedom is real.
So are the bills.
But Kimes has a refreshingly practical definition of success.
She never set out primarily to become rich or famous.
She wanted to spend her life making music.
Onstage.
Behind a microphone.
Travelling.
Playing for people.
And by that measure, she has already built something worthwhile.
That understanding began early.
Growing up in West Michigan, Kimes started playing guitar as a child and was performing around Ludington by her early teens.
Later, seeing musicians such as Lindsay Lou and Billy Strings helped her recognise that a musical career could exist outside the familiar fantasy of being discovered and handed a record deal.
You could simply become a working musician.
Build an audience.
Keep going.
There is something wonderfully ordinary about that ambition.
And something rather extraordinary about actually managing it.
NOBODY FLIES ALONE
There is a slight problem with the phrase independent artist.
It can make the whole thing sound terribly solitary.
One person against the world.
A guitar, a dream and an impressive collection of unpaid invoices.
Kimes sees it differently.
She has been clear about the people who made Daredevil possible.
Her family.
Her friends.
The musicians who helped bring the songs to life.
The people who have supported her work over the years.
Independence, in this case, means making her own decisions and accepting responsibility for them.
It doesn't mean making every record entirely alone.
And that distinction gives the album title another dimension.
The person climbing into the cannon may be taking the risk.
But there are people helping build the thing, checking the equipment and waiting somewhere near the landing.
Hopefully with a drink.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
The title Daredevil arrived at the end of the recording process, but it makes sense of the two things Kimes has been doing.
She has built a working life around uncertainty.
And now she is allowing more of that uncertainty into her songwriting.
The twelve songs came from a period of deliberately questioning what she was willing to put into words.
The result, by her own account, is a more developed version of her writing voice.
That is what makes this second album an interesting step.
Kimes has discovered that leaving something unexplained can make a song more revealing. That an uncomfortable thought might be worth following. That a melody can arrive before the guitar knows what to do with it.
And that the same artist who spends her working life taking practical risks can afford to take a few creative ones too.
None of this guarantees a comfortable landing.
She knows that better than most.
But after nearly ten years of touring, writing and making records on her own terms, Chloe Kimes has a fairly good idea of what she's doing.
Even when she can't know exactly where she'll end up.
Daredevil is out now.
Twelve songs.
Thirty-nine minutes.
And somewhere, presumably, a cannon waiting to be reloaded.