Hiya Kim Logan & the Silhouettes – thanks for joining us in the virtual RGM lounge today! Grab a brew and take a seat.
Hiya! Kim Logan here. My Silhouettes are a shifting cast of international geniuses, and I’ll be speaking for all of us today.
What made you decide that music is a thing for you? Introduce us to you and your musical history.
I told my parents that I wanted singing and poetry to be my “job” when I was in elementary school, so they responded by putting me in classical training, and at a gifted school where I could focus on language and literature. I’m really thankful for that… I spent 17 years with national opera companies before I made my own music the main focus. I came up in the Nashville rock scene before I moved overseas during the first Trump presidency.
What’s the live music scene like where you are based right now? Anyone we should be looking out for (bar you, of course)?
I am based in Glasgow, Scotland and I love this city so much. I think Scotland has one of the best music scenes in the world, and it’s a certain richesse to have some of your best friends be in some of your favorite bands. Check out Night Caller, Barrie-James, The Dead Cinderellas, and Scorpio Leisure. I spend a lot of time working in London as well, and I adore the artists I’ve been lucky enough to be around there, like Adeleye Omotayo, Tom Ford, and Bob Vylan.
I’ve seen a lot of people struggling for support recently online. What’s your view on the industry?
The music industry is cooked, and everyone knows it. Spotify swooped in under the pretense of “saving” the music business from Napster and piracy, but created the most disgusting and inequitable system since the racist mid-century Payola times. They have completely devalued music (and art in general), lowered the global standard for quality, and diluted our individual and collective connections to artists and their work.
They’re literally using (and attempting to patent) a listening surveillance system to gather your data and study your mood/psychological state so that they can use you to make more money and cheat organic artists out of placements and opportunities. Now, the money which should be routed to creatives is lining the pockets of the CEOs of these streaming apps, trickling into their investments in military tech and artificial intelligence. We’ve never been in a worse place for the economics of the music business, no matter how much money they say they’re giving to major labels, as if this is the solution or goal. We need sweeping legislative reform, and we need these CEOs to be afraid of us and what we know.
Where do you feel you currently sit within the music industry?
I feel now more than ever like I’m doing exactly the right thing, by doing exactly whatever I want. My decisions and plans in the industry used to be framed by the rapidly-changing “best practices” of the last decade, and I’ve understood now that it’s all sped up and saturated itself so much that actually, anything goes. Most artists have sold their dignity for a chance at virality by lip-syncing into a front-facing camera. I can’t think of anything less aligned with my own work, and I’m so glad I’ve never succumbed to that. I’m just trying to make great records that don’t sound like anything else.
Tell us two truths and a lie about you.
Hmmm.I smoke weed, I practice witchcraft, and I’m a Taylor Swift fan.
Do you ever worry about people taking things the wrong way? Do you believe in cancel-culture? Discuss….
I’ve had several close friends get unjustly “canceled” based on false accusations, hive-mind hysterics, or even jealousy and sabotage. I have also personally spearheaded the cancellation of someone who deserved it, because he was grooming and abusing young women and girls within the industry. Like anything, this is deeply nuanced and depends on the circumstance. Social media culture and “wokeness vs. anti-wokeness” has truly made everyone frantic and brain-dead. I hope we can all get it together to focus more on issues like reading comprehension and class solidarity sometime soon…
Do you subscribe to any conspiracy theories? If not, why not?
The CIA weaponized the 19th-century term “conspiracy theory” (they didn’t invent the term… that’s a conspiracy theory), letting it fall heavily into cultural circulation in the mid-1960s in an effort to discredit the many people seeking truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The CIA has been responsible for some of the most reprehensible shit that has ever gone down in modern history, from military coups and installations of capitalist pawn leaders, to drugging/neurological experimentation/torture, to international drug and human trafficking, to absorbing dozens of insane Nazi scientists/intelligence agents after WW2 to serve as American collaborators.
That’s all I’ll say, I guess. There’s a pretty sinister overarching goal behind all the current divisive identity politics and misinformation wars, so I think everyone should read about each of these topics as much as they can before firmly believing anything at all.
What was your best experience on stage?
I’ve had a very recent favorite moment actually, playing Mark Lanegan’s “The Gravedigger’s Song” to a sold-out room at Stereo here in Glasgow in January, with my guitarist Mungo Carswell. It felt like MTV Unplugged. There was magic dust in the air.
What was your worst experience on stage?
Anytime some dumbass man has heckled me or said something gross.
Tell us something about you that you think people would be surprised about.
I’m a super good cook, thanks to my family. I spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
What are the next steps you plan to take as a band to reach the next level?
The next Kim Logan & the Silhouettes album, Saturnalia, is coming out this year… has already started its release. I’ve been waiting for this next level of the artistry and message behind the band for so long, and I’m so excited. By the time you read this, the title track should be dropping in only a few weeks.
I hear you have new music. What can you tell us about it?
I’m so thrilled that the new single “Half Life” is finally out in the world. It dropped in January, and my plan of releasing singles one by one is feeling like a long exhale. My producer Rex Roulette, who also played guitar all over the album, was truly my partner in this process… we started from scratch with a handful of demos, when all I knew was that I wanted to change my sound. I had this moment in 2022 where I realized that all the 1960s/1970s worship going on in rock music was making me feel physically sick. The fact that people are still so stuck on the Beatles and Zeppelin is so cringe and lazy to me… it’s embarrassing cosplay at this point, and I’m so tired of all of those songs. When we got into studio for pre-production, Rex passed me a bunch of Mark Lanegan solo albums and Queens of the Stone Age records, and my best friend Lise (her band Pythies is great) turned me on to Depeche Mode and a lot of post punk, cold wave, and goth music. This music made me feel like 90s grunge, y2k alt-rock, and garage revival stuff used to make me feel when I was a kid, and I knew I needed to modernize compared to what I had been doing before. I also became very open about my longtime academic and spiritual occult studies, and let esotericism fully spill into my lyrics… which I hope has saved me from getting lost in any of the empty clichés we hear from every genre.
What was the recording process like?
Rex and I have spent time in London, Manchester, and Los Angeles tinkering away at these songs for the past 2 and a half years. We’ve worked everywhere from world-class studios to Jesse Hughes’ living room, and I’m thankful for every minute of this journey because it turned me into a producer in my own right. Rex, and the brilliant people he brought through to work with us, inspired me to learn the software and language that would empower me to have creative control over my vision. We chopped live performances to make beats and played with drum machines, we brought in legends from Gorillaz, Amy Winehouse’s band, the Kooks, and Jack White’s band to join us in making something fresh, we burnt the candle at both ends searching for the real thing… recording Saturnalia has been arduous, and it’s been the honor of my life!
What was the biggest learning curve in writing the new tunes?
Avoiding my own default settings. The sharpest curves were also some of my favorite moments, like one evening in the Valley when Rex broke down the original and scattered melody of “Half Life,” making me sing it line-by-line within a set of melodic guard rails that made my delivery sound more natural, more like my own speech would sound. He helped me understand that just because I can hoot and holler like Aretha Franklin doesn’t mean I need to meet that expectation every time I create. Evolution feels so good.
Would you change anything now that it’s finished?
Nope. I’m only looking ahead.
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