A wildly original songwriter with a profound sense of purpose, K.Flay approached her new double-EP project Inside Voices and Outside Voices with a crystal-clear intention: to defuse the inner conflicts that lead to toxic repression, and gently guide her audience to a certain transformative freedom. “We’re all repressed in certain ways—whether it’s because of our gender, our sexuality, our religion, our upbringing—and the way I’ve learned to defeat that is by letting all the voices in my head speak,” says the two-time Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter/producer otherwise known as Kristine Flaherty. “I think the only way to live authentically is to confront all the uncomfortable parts of ourselves and accept them without judgement.”
Although both Inside Voices and Outside Voices delve into many of the same themes—identity, loss, personal agency, the corrosive effects of late capitalism—the latter emerged from a deliberate shift in perspective on K.Flay’s part. “So much of [Outside Voices] is about looking at all the discomfort and anger and shame that I talked about on Inside Voices, and asking myself, ‘What’s my part in this mess?’” she says. “How have I helped to create my own chaos? And how can I temper that chaos?” To that end, each song on Outside Voices serves as a more meditative counterpart to a cut from the previous EP: its incandescent opening track “Nothing Can Kill Us,” for instance, marks the flip side to Inside Voices’ magnificently furious “Four Letter Words.” “Both songs are about the end of a relationship, but ‘Four Letter Words’ represents the lashing out, the impulsive release of anger,” Flaherty explains. On the other hand, “Nothing Can Kill Us” looks back on that same relationship with ineffable tenderness. “When you’re so inside of a moment with someone, there’s a feeling of being invincible,” says Flaherty. “But when things fall apart, what do you do? You can lash out, you can thrash and scream. But you can also focus on the ways that person has changed you, and how you’ve changed them too. So no matter where you go, you take each other with you, forever.”
As Flaherty reveals, the completion of Inside Voices and Outside Voices has brought her to a new understanding of how to live without concession or compromise. “It’s made me really consider the extent to which I’ve censored and judged myself, and how to free myself of that in a way that’s not about absolving myself of responsibility,” she says. “In fact, it’s the total opposite: once you’re able to lay it all out and own up to everything—all the shame and anger and feelings of antagonism, and also all the joy and love—that’s when you find real balance. To me it comes down to accepting all those voices and celebrating their coexistence, because no one person is just one thing, and we should never expect them to be. You can be a hundred different things at once if you want.”
