PC: Wrenne Evans
Kinsey Lee of The Wild Reeds embraced her solo project as a soul search. For the first time, since age 19, she’s singing outside of her band The Wild Reeds. In this past year, she hit thirty, turned blonde and went to New Orleans to record her first single “Lover’s Song,” about her past relationship that began and ended right there on the bayou. The song is a part two to The Reeds’ “Fall With Me,” released in 2014. Taking a break from the band’s quintessential three-part harmonies, she’s now singing for one.
Calling from Casey Jane’s (The Lostines) bedroom, Kinsey lets us into her world, one where no one can say “no” to her late night “what ifs” of imagination. Those thoughts turned into a light blue cassette tape, 77.7 Lovers Song Radio – Songs to Ride To, a [physical] gift for us, like golden times when music sharing was intentional. The tape is made for summer and with the visual aid of the “Lovers Song” music video, dropped today, and while the sweet air of summer still lingers, let’s pop in the cassette. It’s “time to hang up that halo put down that rag top and let the world see how bright you shine baby.”
Edited by Hansu Kim | Shot by Kinsey Lee and Josh Shoemaker
Cue Sugar Ray’s “Fly” except here, Mark McGrath sings, “Put your arms around me baby put your arms around me KINSEY.” This sugary Sugar Ray surprise cameo is one of Kinsey’s late night ideas that she recounts in laughter over a series of emails, texts, quick calls mid shift at the deli.
Here’s how the song turned into DJ Dr. Kinsey’s radio hour. She rewinds to 2014 when she wrote The Wild Reeds’ “Fall With Me.” This song was about the beginning of a relationship and “Lover’s Song,” is a part 2 to that story, written about the end. “It all started and ended in New Orleans” she shares, singing, “So it begins I loved you friend but that’s just not enough. I’m getting old too old for young love.”
A couple months before the pandemic, seeking change and a break from LA toxicity, she went back to the place she’s always felt the magic to be herself, a place she fell in love. Knowing only 1.5 people, she fell into friendship with the folks of Mashed Potato Records an ongoing project that captures a music community built in living rooms and on porch steps. Soon, Kinsey was howling to the moon and covering classics with these potato folks. Two of these covers appear on the mixtape alongside “Lovers Song,” which was recorded with Duff and Steph.
“This was the first time I ever recorded a song without The Wild Reeds. I said, ‘Duff, I’ve never done this by myself. I want to be sure of myself today.’” Grabbing sounds within reach — some spoons, a lighter, a “shitty amp,” a drum machine app — the three laid down the track and “jumped down the rabbit hole.” “Guitars and amps… they’re like little weapons. Some people make the most beautiful music from what they have lying around,” she says.
With The Reeds, Kinsey always wrote with bandmates Mack and Sharon’s voices in mind, thinking of blending their three voices together for the group’s 3-part harmonies. Now, writing and singing for her voice alone, she found this untapped deep vibrato. “I didn’t know I could emote that way. I’m reinventing myself,” she shares. After recording, she felt this liberating high from the freedom to make her own decisions, “I had the idea to make a mixtape from all these late night ideas where I cracked myself up.” This voice kept telling her, “Do it, I dare you.” “No one can stop me!” she laughs. And one of those moments guided her to buy an ‘85 Chrysler LeBaron convertible. And what goes in a LeBaron? A cassette featuring Dolly Parton and Sam Cooke among many other favorites.
Without giving too much away — the mixtape is full of surprises (a prescription from the doctor we have to trust) — the curated Songs To Ride To span decades, including singalongs, cameos, and covers living ephemerally in limited copies of a physical cassette tape adorned with resin art made by bandmate Mack. The whole project was very organic and DIY. Coupled with deep introspection during a collective year of solitude, Dr. Kinsey became “a heightened version of [herself]. An Adriana La Cerva meets Karen Sharp personality” that all came together by following her truth.
Kinsey shares her background of a big Italian family with a conservative Christian upbringing while she always looked up to our 90s icons —Brit (#freeBrit) and Christina. “I so badly wanted to be like them which wasn’t healthy for a chubby little girl with body image issues because of those things. But now, as a 30 year adult, I get to become the woman that I always wanted to be when I was 13. I can dress how I want. I can make the music I want. I can buy the car everybody tells me not to buy. I get to lean into that sexy part of myself that for a long time growing up in the church was frowned upon. That’s why I like nostalgia. Because I can go back to the time I was 13 and say OMG belly rings are so hot I’m gonna get one. And I finally pierced my belly button!”
And what next of the doctor? Well, she’s wearing her grandma’s sexy leopard tank top channeling Adriana La Cerva (this was fulfilled in buddy Grady Strange’s video for Karma’s A Gun). The doctor cruises up to the stop light, waving with red nails to the old folks who wag thumbs ups at her LaBeron.
Like the last track on Lover’s Song Radio, a feminized version of Sinatra’s “My Way” she leaves us with a vocal power and self-certainty that has just been discovered. “There are exciting things on the horizon that make that possible,” she says hinting that she’ll come back next winter to New Orleans to howl, sing, and make more music in the place where her lover’s story began.
PC: Grady Strange
STREAM LOVERS SONG AND GET PHYSICAL WITH THE “SONGS TO RIDE TO” CASSETTE VIA BANDCAMP