Amythyst Kiah: Another Bright Side

photo: Kevin & King

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Amythyst Kiah sits in the backyard of her home in Johnson City, Tenn. A woodpecker tapping a nearby tree and the whining whistle of a lonesome train in the distance are the only sounds breaking the serenity of this early autumn afternoon. It’s a poetically archetypical backdrop, this idyllic Appalachian valley town, particularly apt for an Americana singer songwriter in the prime of her career. Yet, Kiah is anything but typical.

As a youth, Kiah was a self-described “anime-nerd mall goth,” and her new LP, Still + Bright, nods conspicuously and tenderly to those heady teenage years. It’s an album stocked with elucidations on religion and Eastern philosophy, love and death, even ghost stories and the Crusades, keeping that fledgling persona alive within her savagely contemplative present mindset. In spite of, or perhaps because of, such heavyweight, often dark, subjects—indeed, she even titles one ode to love “Dark Matter”—Kiah contends she’s found a new and revelatory joy in composing and performing these dozen songs. Again, this is an artist who is anything but typical.

It’s tempting to try and detect the flashpoint of Kiah’s artistry. Maybe it’s because her life’s story, like that of so many artists, offers a myriad of moments from which to choose. One thing is for certain: Kiah, too, has examined each one.

Self-awareness has been a hallmark of Kiah’s creative expression stretching back to when she was 12 and picked up her first guitar. She grew up in Chattanooga, riding bikes, skateboarding and playing basketball. Her days of competitive hoops ended as she approached her junior year of high school—she had become disillusioned with the parental politics influencing amateur athletics. The games just were not fun anymore.

A voracious reader, she loved books and often wrote poetry. Kiah’s parents saw the shift away from sports and enrolled her in the Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts. Surrounded by like-minded peers, Kiah thrived. “It proved to be a really important moment in my life because it gave me the opportunity to be with people that I could be myself around,” Kiah says. “It was a really profound lesson learned. The arts became a haven for me.”

Then, when Kiah was 17, her mother committed suicide. Her father battled a growing drug addiction. And Kiah, an only child, went into survival mode.

To cope with her grief, school became her security blanket. At East Tennessee State University, she bounced from major to major, graduating with a degree in Bluegrass, Old-Time and Country Music Studies. “My academic path was definitely not the norm,” Kiah says. “I was burying myself in academia. And even though my path wasn’t the most direct, ultimately, what I wanted the most in my life was to be able to create art and live comfortably. I wanted to be able to work for myself.”

Part of what makes Still + Bright such a progressive step forward for Kiah actually stems from her ability to look backward. The album’s predecessor, 2021’s Wary + Strange—her first on Rounder Records— centered around trauma and alienation. “The first record was a lot about catharsis,” Kiah says. “It was about me working through a big loss.”

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Kiah’s output prior to signing with Rounder consisted of a self-produced debut LP, Dig, in 2013, and three years later, an EP, Her Chest of Glass. She began working on Wary + Strange in 2018, recording the album three separate times over three years. In 2019, she stepped away from the Wary sessions to work on Songs of Our Native Daughters, an all-women-of-color ensemble piece featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell. Kiah’s solo contribution to the record, “Black Myself,” earned a 2020 Grammy nomination for Best American Roots Song. Suddenly, Kiah was the new, thought-provoking darling of the Americana scene. For both critics and fans, anticipation for Wary + Strange ran high. Then, COVID-19 hit.

Releasing an album and touring in support of it during a global pandemic proved challenging, of course, with plenty of delays and rescheduling—not to mention the unexpected personal feelings that surfaced during the shows that Kiah was actually able to perform. “I was having to tour and repeatedly talk about my trauma,” Kiah says. “It was hard for me to live in the present because I was always re-triggering myself. I didn’t see that as being a potential issue. There was no way to know that’s how I was going to respond.”

Living in a pandemic-plagued present, as well, provided its own demons for Kiah. She felt disheartened by the disintegration of public discourse, growing sick over the way people spoke to each other, especially in the increasingly vitriolic virtual world. She stopped feeling safe having conversations.

“I didn’t know who was going to bite my head off,” Kiah says.

She sought out unifying stories and ideas, determined not to indulge in the negative energy that surrounded her. The weight of her anxieties and grief began to lift. She also dug back into her teenage journals, reacquainting herself with themes, stories and subjects she once enjoyed. Still + Bright’s lead track, “Play God and Destroy the World,” derives its title from a previous song Kiah wrote and performed at her high-school talent show. The follow up single, “I Will Not Go Down,” draws its chorus from a journal entry detailing her teen ruminations on the Crusades.

“Now, being able to feel comfortable really expressing how I feel, it’s been awesome to be more present and be more playful and to have fun with songwriting, as opposed to every song having to be about the inner depths of my soul,” Kiah says.

However, playful and fun should not be confused with disposable or trivial. Kiah laces her lyrics with indictments of religion and corruption, or musings on existentialism and the universe. She keeps the indentations left on her from growing up queer and Black in a conservative, devout, church-going community in Tennessee close.

There is also Kiah’s enduring taste for sci-fi, Southern Gothic and the macabre. The 1999 neo-classic film, The Matrix, continues to inspire her deepening dives into philosophy. The murderous and ghostly love drama, The Haunting of Bly Manor, spurred Kiah to pen her rather innocuously titled “Silk and Petals.”

“These are things I’ve always loved and been interested in, but I found myself veering away from,” Kiah says. “I’ve been reconnecting with all of that. It does bring me joy, and it’s hard to explain why. I like watching things that help me keep perspective about the present.”

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Kiah made some significant changes to her songwriting process this time around. The only child in her always appreciated a straight line—focusing in on a target and then pursuing it alone. She’d never been much for co-writing.

“I tended to be really guarded about my songs. I would never let anybody hear them until they were finished,” Kiah admits.

From the Native Daughters album sessions, she got her first taste of collaboration but failed to tuck away that lesson. She knew that, in order to grow as an artist, she had to humble herself and accept it was time to try something different. She turned to YouTube channels on songwriting and, fighting through her hesitancy, reconsidered co-writing.

“I had to relearn how to write songs,” Kiah says. “I couldn’t rely on emotional turmoil to write songs anymore. I was like, ‘I am uncomfortable with co-writing. I have my own socially anxious fears, but I’m going to have to be a little uncomfortable for a minute. Nothing horrible is going to happen to me—let’s just do it and see what comes of it.’”

That realization resulted in co-writes on seven of the album’s 12 tracks. Kiah kept diverse company, pairing up with a variety of artists, including punk icon Tim Armstrong, Sadler Vaden of Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit, Avi Kaplan from Pentatonix and singer-songwriter Sean McConnell. She also teamed up with the album’s producer, Butch Walker, for two cuts.

Kiah and Walker first met at the annual Georgia on My Mind benefit at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium. The two expressed a mutual admiration for each other’s work. “There were a couple of songs that I’d started writing that had more of a rock influence,” Kiah says. “I figured he would be ‘the guy’ to work with on those.”

The creation of two songs with Walker— “Never Alone” and “I Will Not Go Down”— coincided with Kiah’s burgeoning interest in guitar effects pedals. Walker, whose client sheet as a producer runs from Taylor Swift to Green Day and Weezer, wasn’t a stranger to experimentation. Producing Still + Bright at his Tennessee studio, Walker expanded the scope of Kiah’s sonic territory, introducing heavier tones amidst her acoustic guitar and banjo lines.

“In the Americana genre, there’s room to explore and try different sounds and the fans are usually open to hearing different things. But there is also the danger of going off the beaten path and losing some people,” Kiah says.

Kiah also wanted to juxtapose these weighty lyrics with music that was more upbeat. The album’s opener, “Play God and Destroy the World,” exemplifies the concept, somewhat defining all that follows. Musically, the poppy bounce of the sing song chorus is deceptively smile-inducing, as the foreboding lyrical refrain repeats, “We’re all going six-feet underground.”

Conspicuous, as well, was a palpable sonic sense of the dramatic, especially in Kiah’s vocal delivery. The approach, which was operatic-like on several lines, underscored the material’s edge. Kiah credits the change to her warm-up routine on the previous tour.

“Before every show, I was doing different vocal exercises. I found that I was starting to really expand on my vocal range. It made it ripe for so many more melodic possibilities. What resulted from that, more or less, is an acoustic folk record with some pop sensibility,” Kiah says. “Singing was more fun than it had been before, and that breathed new life into me.”

The collaborations went beyond the writing. Walker played bass throughout the album, doubling with drummer Matty Alger to form a rhythm section well equipped at stretching from delicate to marauding. Kiah welcomed mellifluous string work from Ellen Angelico on guitar, Dobro and mandolin while Tania Elizabeth contributes fiddle.

She also invited some special guests to dress up a few numbers, including Willie Nelson’s longtime harmonica ace, Mickey Raphael, singer-songwriter S.G. Goodman and resident bluegrass phenom Billy Strings.

Kiah has been a Strings fan since his 2017 breakthrough, Tinfoil & Turmoil. The two share an affection for heavy metal, tempting Kiah, on “I Will Not Go Down,” to turn Strings loose. “Symphonic metal is probably my favorite genre,” Kiah says. “And I know he’s got a metal background. To me, bluegrass is the metal of folk music.”

Though she describes Still + Bright as a modern Southern-rock record, one could make an argument that the album is nearly genre-less. Despite the variety of styles and influences, it nevertheless blends into a cohesive set that could easily garner attention from Americana folk, rock and pop audiences alike. Strings and Goodman’s appearances pull in similarly bucolic directions, yet Walker’s deft and deliberate deployment of bigger, broader, potentially bombastic sonic landscapes tugs back.

And though the album’s revealing and optimistic title reprises the stylized form of the plus sign seen on Wary + Strange, Kiah says there is actually not a conceptual connection between the two names. Instead, she drew inspiration for her latest from Laozi’s foundational Taoist text, Tao Te Ching.

“It’s representative of me taking time. The stillness represents meditation, having time to just sit and breathe in the present, and creating more of those moments in my life,” Kiah says. “Bright, particularly, came from a line, ‘Bright, but not dazzling.’ Being bright is about aligning your head with your heart.”

For Kiah, Still + Bright is that alignment.

“This record is my way to celebrate this new chapter in my life, to write from a place that matches where I am right now,” Kiah says. “Yeah, I feel like things are pretty good.”