As I sit down to chat with Kaiyah Mercedes, I’m struck by her incredible presence. She’s warm, articulate and funny as we weave in and out of what’s defined her journey to this point. Barely out of her teenager years, she’s probably the youngest pop star I’ve ever interviewed but any fears I might have had about needing to water down this interview are quickly assuaged by her insightful responses to my early questions, and we quickly get off track digging into both her personal experiences as a musician and a general take on shaping the Australian music industry as a whole.
On the face of it, Kaiyah’s journey into the industry sounds relatively normal. She started out writing songs as a teenage girl in her bedroom. However, once you realise this played out over a backdrop of lockdowns, uncertainty, and as an undiagnosed neurodivergent kid trying to work out who she was, it gives you the first glimpse into just how remarkable Kaiyah actually is.
“I think I was 13 and school was obviously out. I was at home all the time and I was discovering who I was in a way that was really abnormal. Like a lot of people my age at that time, we didn’t have social experience and social interaction”
“And so I felt very lost and I didn’t know I was neurodivergent, I didn’t know I was queer and I was trying to figure all that out without outside input and I ended up finding music, and I spent two years on Zoom, with my camera off and my mic off, just writing songs, and teaching myself instruments, and it was an outlook that I really needed at the time.”
Kaiyah speaks lovingly of her mum’s support from encouraging her to take singing lessons to pivoting from a career in retail and corporate management to the music industry (she now acts as Kaiyah’s manager). “None of my family are musical” Kaiyah confesses, and with the support of her mentor at the time, Francesca de Valence, Kaiyah and her mum began taking their first tentative steps into the music industry together.
Kaiyah widely acknowledges that her journey wouldn’t have been possible without this sense of community.
Early in her music career it was the support of her local community and performing live shows as a part of the Frankston Council FReeZA program that buoyed Kaiyah to bigger stages.
She has now also found this support amongst the queer, neurodivergent and disabled communities. And to Kaiyah, this relationship is symbiotic. It’s not enough that’s she’s found her place there, she wants to actively shape these spaces, to take the warmth and care she received and make it even better.
She speaks proudly of her role as a Euphoria Foundation ambassador:
“I love every event with them, because (it’s) genuinely such a kind community. The picnic that I played at was such a supportive environment. Everyone was either queer or an ally. It felt so safe, so supportive and sometimes the world doesn’t feel that way and I’ve just been very lucky to be able to be proud of creating community outside of music that is welcoming and kind, which is just like what I try to do for my music.”
And also of her work with Liberate Community:
“I work a lot with Liberate Community, which is an incredible community organisation who really support Melbourne artists. Jay (Liberate’s co-founder) is just incredible and so supportive and has the purest intentions with music.”
While we were on this topic I asked her what the most challenging part of being in the industry is, as someone who is neurodivergent, expecting a response around how overwhelming or inflexible it is. And while Kaiyah definitely noted these things, the answer she definitively settles on is “being underestimated”. Of course, she alluded to how it’s almost impossible to untangle how much of that is down to her neurodiversity and how much is due to her being a young woman, but it’s saddening that she’s seen and felt this so significantly. I also begin to reflect on if I had underestimated her, and I hoped not.
In the course of discussing visibility in the industry our conversation drifts to the importance of artists like Chappell Roan and Lola Young.
“I really admire what she’s done. I’ve always been worried that who I am will decide whether I can become successful or not. And seeing people like them who struggle with mental health challenges pretty openly. Who are queer, who are openly just weird, particularly Chappell. You don’t see many people like her in recent times, someone who is a lesbian, someone who is just wacky, who doesn’t try and fit into a box”
At this point I’m starting to feel like I’ve gone about this interview entirely the wrong way, and it feels a little trite to go from this deep discussion on identity and the wider music industry to “who are your musical influences”. However, one very much begets the other and Kaiyah’s way of moving through the world and the music she creates are intrinsically intertwined.
Other than the aforementioned Chappell Roan, Kaiyah cites Taylor Swift and Foo Fighters as two of her key musical influences. When I suggest they’re quite diverse, she quickly corrects me:
“It’s actually, I feel, not as vast as one may think. In terms of Taylor’s music, a lot of her lyrics, like people do rock and punk and emo covers of hers all the time. And Foo Fighters lyrics, if you actually sit down and look at them, like, they have some pretty deep songs. They’re very poetic, actually. I feel like people take it at face value rather than listening to what they’re saying and they are pretty talented writers.”
And of course she’s right, and I’m pretty sure Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl has actually spoken about a similar parallel in past interviews.
“And so I think that’s what I’m trying to take into this project that I’m currently doing” Kaiyah shares “is a bit of the heaviest sound influence, a lot more drums, guitar, making it a bit heavier, but still keeping that poetic and really meaningful nature of my lyrics.”
Kaiyah’s recent single Miss Me highlights this sound. Sharing a little more on this recent work she offers,
“Basically, it was a song that I wrote pretty soon after a break up I had 2023. And I’ve always stayed in love with it. I worked on piano, and I remember just thinking, I was sort of at that halfway point, teetering on the edge of like what is so wrong with me and what is so wrong with them? And this song within the 3 minutes of it, taking you on that journey of that battle, that tug of war within yourself, starting with that self-doubt spiral and ending with you really miss this because I was enough. It’s very powerful and I’ve always had a soft spot for it and I was very excited when i finally got some time where I could record it.”
Kaiyah confides that she “not the type of person who just works in singles”. Also sharing that all of the songs to her upcoming album were written before she released her previous record. She already has two albums under her belt at this point and I was curious both if she felt accomplished and how it felt releasing songs so long after she wrote them.
“I think it’s hard for me to gauge being accomplished, because I was going to a recording studio after school, and my song came out, and then I go to chemistry class, and my album was released, but then I had math. Like, it always felt a little anticlimactic because I was just releasing these albums and then going to school. Like, it didn’t feel huge.”
This is probably one of the only times you get a true glimmer of just how young she was when this all started. Her goal was two albums before 18, which she hit and she’s now on the way to her third before the age of 21. The advantage of thinking in albums is that she has a clear picture of what she wants. While she’s still somewhat tight-lipped about the full details of her next album, she knows, has always known, what the message and the vision is.
Beyond the next project I ask what her long term goals are. “A world tour” she says decisively. “Not just an Australian tour, like a world tour”. Earlier in our interview I might have asked how she’d achieve this with the potential extra challenges of a disability, but she will, there’s no doubt about it. So instead I ask if she thinks it’s harder to achieve this as an Australian artist and she agrees that both the distance and the fact Australian culture is not as mainstream as European or American culture. She ends this comment with “doesn’t mean I won’t try” which I think tells you everything you need to know about Kaiyah’s attitude to – well everything
It felt fitting to end the interview with some of her final thoughts about how we build a better music industry:
“I think we need to keep expanding and keep encouraging people with disabilities to be present in the music industry and give them the resources and accessibility that they need because any unique person that is part of this industry is someone who is valuable.
And we need different perspectives and different life experiences to make music what we’ve always loved, which is special and unique. I think people need to open their minds and their hearts a little bit more.”
You can catch Kaiyah live at Liberate Community’s Equaliser: A Disability Pride Party on 25th July at the Leadbeater Hotel. Tickets here.
Listen to her music here.
And follow her here.