If you haven’t heard the name Kaleah Lee yet, you certainly will soon. The Vancouver-based singer-songwriter and producer has spent the past several years captivating listeners with her individualised take on fan-favourite Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, and Bon Iver tracks, but more recently, she’s been letting us into her lyrical genius as well. With the same intimate folk essence she brings to her covers, Lee blends sharp songwriting with soft vocals on her debut EP, a coming-of-age exploration of growth and change entitled “Birdwatcher.”
“My sister made me post my first cover,” Lee shares with me from her side of the world. It’s the morning for her over in Canada, and she sits in the house I can only presume has been the site of her viral TikToks and recent writing sessions alike. “I would [make videos] by myself and never show anyone and then one time, I showed her and she freaked out. She was like, ‘you have to post it somewhere! I’ll do it!’”
But after her sister initially posted it, Lee cried and took it down. It was her own decision, ultimately, to put it back up. “I reposted it later because people were very nice, but it was scary.”
Since then, her platform has grown and the nerves have settled. But releasing original music is a different game. “I think I’ve gotten over it but there’s definitely still fear in there for sure. The original stuff, especially now, is harder for me to want to even share. Often when I started, I would write things and immediately post a video of me singing it. But now, I’m more cautious. I think I’m just a little bit more aware that there’s people that are gonna hear the things I write?” Luckily for us, she hasn’t let the fear stop her from sharing.
Following a west-coast tour with fellow singer-songwriters Leith Ross and Searows, Lee found herself reflecting on her identity and goals, posing questions that are easier asked than answered: Who is she? Where will she go? What did she want to say with her voice? “Birdwatcher” delves into these questions, exploring the ins and outs of human nature. While Lee works through the parts of herself she’d like to shed, from people-pleasing tendencies to seasonal depression to self-righteousness, she invites listeners to reflect on that of their own right alongside her. While we might finish the project with more questions than answers, we also leave feeling a little less alone. And that, in a nutshell, is the musical power of Kaleah Lee.
“When I started writing for the EP, I wasn’t really thinking I was going to make an EP. Even when I decided I’m going to make a project and started writing more, it wasn’t fully with the intent of having it be super cohesive. It’s just a collection.” The intro track, a spoken-word poem, seemingly ties all of the songs together – but Lee explains she actually wrote it quite a while before. “It is from a YouTube video I made. I’d make video diaries occasionally and had written that and filmed a video for it and then ended up using that poem in the intro afterwards. I had already made the intro and it was just an instrumental, but then added that after. It was made before, completely disconnected, but it worked. It was perfect and strange.”
As she experiments and comes into her own as a musician, Lee has learned a lot about the way she works best. “The more time [spent] writing and creating things, I’ve learned that how I make things is more intuitive, so I’ve just kind of learned to go with my weird flow.” The flow, which happens in a different way for each track, typically begins with lyrics and is accomplished in one sitting. “I would write poems and use that as the base of the song or build off of words or lines that I’ve written down,” she explains.
“And I have a hard time writing parts of things and then revisiting them. Usually, when I write something, it’s all the way through.” For some tracks, such as “Rotting Fruit,” Lee was so in the moment that she doesn’t even fully remember the writing process. “That’s how I know it was great — because I was really in it.”
Production-wise, “Rotting Fruit” is one of her personal favourites. “It’s different from previous stuff and I just had a lot of fun playing with it,” she tells me. “I have a midi keyboard and I would just choose random sounds and be like, ‘oh I like that.’ I think I was the most adventurous with that, so I’m proud of it.”
