The camera furiously shuttered as she seamlessly moved from pose to pose, needing little direction, but taking it when suggested. She stared down the lens with a focused intensity, exuding confidence and revealing the essence of a true artist in her element. The final photo snaps, she took a swig of Gatorade and shifted her focus to the interview portion of the afternoon.
She’s not new to this. She’s a pro.
BTT: So, your album (Made from the Dirt) has been out for over a year, and it’s still gaining traction, and you’ve been with MCA since 2017. So at least from the outside it seems like a fruitful relationship, but the label structure is much less prevalent these days. Do you get any pressure to put out new material?
KA: No, they’re really great at letting me take my artistic liberties. Obviously, there’s a rhythm to it. And the kiddies get mad if you don’t give’em new stuff every couple months. You must feed the algorithm! But they’re really good at letting me do my thing; it’s always quality over quantity, but you also have to realize there’s a math equation at the same time.
BTT: Is it more of a social media thing to keep fans interested and invested?
KA: Yes, for sure. The past couple years the pressure to be a content creator before anything else is the heaviest burden. There are shitty days when I cannot believe I had to spend three hours editing a fucking TikTok that someone’s gonna watch for 10 seconds instead of writing a song that could move the needle for me, but at the same time I heard Billie Eilish’s brother talking about how we could bitch about doing a TikTok all day long; we can go round and round about how that is not important and we just want to write music. Okay, back in the day, would you rather spend thousands of dollars on a billboard that somebody drives by and maybe remembers your name and doesn’t have a cell phone to look you up as soon as you see it, would you rather do that?
BTT: But that’s gotta be frustrating. At the core, it’s all about the music. How does that affect your writing and creative process?
KA: I try to concentrate on the fact that successful people pivot—like, it’s fine whatever adversity comes my way I’ll make it my bitch, I’ll jump over it, fist-fight it, go around it, but we’re gonna make it happen because I’m fucking good and I deserve to have it. But like I said, some days are harder than other days—you might play a show where the crowd is completely full, and my tank is full, I can make some TikTok videos, but other times you could be at home for down period and be like ‘how the fuck am I going to come up with content when I’ve been sitting at my house for 10 days? It’s a beast, but I don’t try to kill the beast, I just try to leash it.
BTT: It seems like country music is at a crossroads with new subgenres emerging constantly.
KA: Ehh, maybe like three, four or five roads splitting off all different ways; it’s a roundabout intersection, fucking four leaf clover.
BTT: Ha! Exactly. So where do you see it going? Are artists just playing whatever their preferred genre is under the guise of country music? Or is it really growing organically and can possibly provide something for everyone?
KA: We’ve definitely added a lot more subgenres, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think right now we’re going through some growing pains as far as people agreeing or disagreeing, or Grammys adding a more traditional country category, or this festival being this, this and that; it’s not this small labeled box anymore. But I mean, think of all the other genres that have subgenres, and they maybe went through this growing pain when they started branching off, and they got the fuck over it. We’re welcoming new people to the genre, and there couldn’t be anything better for us—more revenue, more fans, more everything. Like you said, there’s something for everyone and I think it’s great that it’s not just one blank label of country or non-country—most people’s playlist is diverse, so let it be whatever it is, and just because there’s some subgenres of country that you don’t like, that doesn’t mean it’s not country, it just means they’re not yours.
At this point her manager came over with a calm urgency. “I’m so sorry to cut this short, gentlemen. Kass, we gotta move.” From photo shoot, to interview, to the stage in the span of about 45 minutes, she graciously thanked us and set off toward the stage—sufficiently hydrated—minutes away from wowing yet another crowd. Catch this elegant badass when she storms through your town continuing her onslaught of taking over the country music scene.
Photos: Cory Weaver