Interview: Kelaska

Kelaska, born Kelli Wright,  is a Connecticut based singer-songwriter. After gaining a following of over 30,000 subscribers on her Youtube channel,  she began to write and create her own music. Blending dreamy waves of indie pop with honest storytelling, Kelaska has found her own unique genre.  

Growing up in the small town of Plainfield, Ct,  Kelaska spent her childhood years writing silly pop songs in her bedroom. Her passion for singing started at the age of three,  begging to sing any chance she got. By her junior year of high school,  she started to discover and fall in love with music from the 60s and 70s; falling asleep to The Beatles every night and waking up with them every morning. She filled her music library with the classics of Springsteen,  Fleetwood Mac,  and Queen,  while still enjoying the current indie scene of artists such as KT Tunstall,  Death Cab for Cutie,  and The Killers.  

Hi! How are you? and days with that machine

“Im good! how are you?!”

I’m doing good!
Alright! So coming from a small town in Connecticut, you have had a passion your whole life with music it seems like! How did you get into it at such a young age? Was anyone in your family into it too that you grew up around it?

“So my grandfather has been in a band, he played in a country band, played guitar and he sang since probably he was a teenage. So my mom and her two sisters sang sometimes with the band and I kind of grew up with that. I would sing s lot of the time when I was young with him and then pretty much ever since I can remember, everyone in my family was a little bit musical. My brother played guitar, my mom came home with a karaoke machine when I was about 8 and that was the end of that. I just spent hours and days and days with that machine and I just knew that I wanted to sing every moment of my life.

So I know you started off doing covers, but What got you started in creating those YouTube covers?

“For a really long time, me and my best friend would say ‘oh you know we should start a YouTube channel and she was gonna do vlogs or something and I was gonna do music and we never really committed to it and then one night I was like ‘ I’m gonna throw up a cover’ I could barely play the guitar at all, like didn’t even know what I was doing. I just put it up there and then I am kind of an OCD person and I get addicted pretty easily so as soon as I put the first one out and everybody in my family was like ‘wow! that’s great!’ you know, then I was like okay I have to do this every week and i just stuck with it. My friend ended up never putting anything up, I was kinda glad because I really enjoyed doing that. I did a cover a week for probably 5 years so it got pretty busy doing that and at the time I had written originals but would say my artistry wasn’t formed enough yet where I knew what I was doing to put up originals”. I’m kind of a perfectionist so when I did put up originals, for them to be professional and polished”

So you are an indie artist, how did you decide that was the genre for you?

“I guess Its hard to kind of pin point where my music falls because I’ll have certain songs that some people would classify as country pop, my song called ‘What you want’ has kind of this steel guitar slides in it and a lot of people were saying it has a country feel which is funny because I never would’ve said that that was the genre that would be. I feel like really influenced by a lot of people. I’m influenced by Kacey Musgraves who is country, then i’m influenced y Fleetwood mac who is classic rock and then you have you know, somebody like John Mayer, there’s just a lot of really different influences and so I didn’t want to be nailed down into one category and I feel like with Indie you are kind of freer then just classic pop to kind of experiment”

You went to Berklee school of music right?

“Yes! I’m still going there currently!”

How was that? How’d that help your music journey?

“I would say it’s great. I do just online because I’m still living in Connecticut and so I’m sure its a little bit different if you actually go to the school but I would say that it hasn’t really had any eye-opening moments for me but I do feel like it’s helped taken what I have and shaped that to be stronger, kind of give me a better foundation to make songs out of”

Let’s get into “Old ghosts”

“Okay!”

The song is described as “much darker” and about “regret and loss” What inspired that theme for it?

“So I spend a lot of my time thinking about like friendships I’ve lost, relationships I’ve lost, just even people that I wouldn’t say I’ve fallen out of touch in a bad way with, but just people that aren’t in my life anymore. I almost feel haunted by all of those thoughts because I’m constantly just missing these people or if I did do something wrong I’m thinking about what I should’ve done different or I’m thinking about if I should reach out to them. it just consumes a lot of my life and so I have been thinking about it a lot lately and I wanted to write a song that had a strong beat and when me and my producer, when we came up with that beat, that message kind of came through as this is what this song is about it is definitely darker and has a little bit of a tribeness to it. So this is it, this is the time to write out this part of life”

What was the process like behind creating it?

“It started out where as I said I took like, went to his studio and I explained that I wanted a best sort of like where he was just banging his hands on a desk and he did and within 5 minutes we had out beat. I read him some of the lyrics I had on my phone, that didn’t really have any melody attached to it that were kind of on the same concept of ‘Old Ghosts’ and he was like ‘yeah you got to stick with that’ so I went home and wrote the melody and the rest of it within maybe 10-20 minutes and then when I brought it back to him, and it kind of came together pretty quickly with the things we added. The only thing that kind of took forever was, there’s a lot of vocal tracks on this song and whispers in the bridge there’s a section where there’s a bunch of whispers that come through and those took quite a bit of time to nail down but besides that, everything else was pretty fast coming together. That was a lot of fun too, to make this one

What’s your favorite lyric from it? Any that stuck with you?

“Yes! Probably the first line of it, “I brought a gun to a knife fight” I like that line mainly because I can’t even tell you how I thought of it because it came to me well before I wrote the song. I just felt like it stuck with me because it’s kind of a fun twist on the classic line of that, it kind of reminds me of something that Kacey Musgraves would write or something. I feel like it’s interesting, like you want to hear what the rest of the story is about because it’s a twist on what your used to hearing”

The cover of it gives me dark witchy vibes hahah I love it. 

“Thank you haha! Yeah that was my main goal, I was like I want this to be like I’m having a séance, trying to contact the dead but at the same time maybe I’m trying to make them leave too”
What message do you hope people will take out of “old ghosts”

“I guess with this song, I hope that they at least like it. I wanted to, I’ve written a lot of songs that are I guess a little bit more sad and it still has a sad message overall, but it’s a little bit more upbeat and I just hope that they have fun listening to it and hearing all the different aspects of the song”
Are there any more exciting things for you coming for the rest of the year that fans can look forward to?

‘Yeah! So right now I’m actually, we are in the last stages of the next song, it’ll be called ‘September’ and It’s going to be released in September and I’ve never written a love song from start to finish and I’ve actually never released a love song professionally so I’m really excited, this is my favorite one we’ve ever done. It’s really fun and sweet and I just can’t wait for it to come out! I might try to also do a Christmas cover at the end of the year”

Where can people find you to keep supporting you?

“I am on pretty much every social media platform. I would say I use Instagram most and I’m on tiktok I use that from time to time but I would say Instagram is probably the one that I use daily! Also Spotify! I always tell people to stream on Spotify to help get on some editorial playlists”

Check out more of Kelaska HERE.

Follow and stream her on Spotify.

Listen to ‘Old ghosts’ HERE