When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
When Bella Kay finally went back to in-person school after the COVID-19 pandemic — she’d gone remote starting at the end of eighth grade, which is maybe as bad as it gets? — she tried finding an activity in high school that might approximate the songwriting she’d started doing on her own at home.
“I was like, I guess I’ll do theater,” she recalls. “I wanted to get better at being onstage and having a stage presence. And, honestly, it was really fun — I got really into movement, and I had a great group of friends.”
Looking back, she reckons the best show she performed in was “Legally Blonde,” which Vista Ridge High School near Austin, Texas, presented in January 2022. Did Kay play the iconic lead role originated in the movie by Reese Witherspoon? She erupts in laughter at the thought.
“Bro, I was a sophomore,” she answers. “I was Ensemble Member No. 4.”
Just a few years later, the idea of Kay in the spotlight isn’t so far-fetched: In April, her song “Iloveitiloveiloveit” — a jittery pop-rock jam about falling (and re-falling) for a guy she knows is bad news — broke into the Top 20 of Billboard’s Hot 100. Grammy prognosticators have tipped Kay as a potential best new artist nominee when nods are announced Nov. 16. And in the months ahead she’s set to tour as an opening act for both Noah Kahan and Gracie Abrams.
Before that, the 20-year-old will headline a show of her own Tuesday night at the El Rey Theatre in Los Angeles, where she moved from Texas to pursue music after giving college a brief whirl.
“I thought being a lawyer sounded reliable, but then school beat my a—,” she says now. “I decided the universe was telling me that wasn’t right for me.”
With nearly half a billion streams on Spotify, “Iloveitiloveiloveit” is easily the biggest hit from Kay’s debut album, “My Reckless Abandon.” But the LP is full of sharply composed songs that depict the internal emotional battles of one’s late teens and early 20s; amid arrangements that blend strummy singer-songwriter guitars with bleary synths and woozy programmed beats, Kay sings frankly about sex and self-image, her close-miked vocals carrying the sting of confession as well as a prickly sense of humor.
“As a person, I tend to dance around things when I’m speaking,” she says. “But when I write and when I’m singing, I’m a lot more like, ‘This is exactly what I want to say’” — one way to explain the startling candor of a song like “Sleep for Dinner,” which addresses Kay’s history of disordered eating.
“All I do is think about what goes in my mouth — if it should go in and how I can get it out,” she sings over tolling piano chords.
Kay and I are talking over coffee on a recent morning in Hollywood; she’s got a studio session booked this afternoon but after our chat we wander across the street to the Supervinyl record store, where she picks up copies of Billie Eilish’s “Hit Me Hard and Soft” and “Kansas Anymore” by Role Model. The singer likes L.A., though she hasn’t quite “figured out my work life here,” she says, meaning a fine-grained understanding of “work friends vs. friend friends,” as she puts it.
“I need to lock in and know the difference. My job is specifically to be vulnerable, so I’m spilling secrets to people — that’s just who I am. But just because you tell someone this and they tell you that, it doesn’t necessarily mean…,” she adds, trailing off. “Also, people in L.A. are very ‘We’re best friends,’ quote-unquote. But are you actually gonna be there?”
Kay, whose dad is Black and mom is white, grew up exposed to a wide variety of music from her parents: She remembers hearing SZA in the car as her dad drove her to school; her first concert was a show by Tori Amos that she went to with her mom. During COVID she got deep into Abrams and Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine — “these girls who were just bleeding out on a page.”
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Like virtually everyone in her generation, Kay recognizes the ground broken by Taylor Swift. “Totally respect her — amazing songwriter,” she says. “But that always felt like an unattainable pop star. Little old me in Texas didn’t feel like I could reach that,” she adds, as compared to “these relatable singer-songwriters that are just a girl in a room with a guitar. I was like, I can do that.”
And so she did, filming “terrible TikToks that would get three likes” until school resumed and she turned to musical theater. Yet Kay never stopped writing songs; occasionally she’d even perform them at school coffeehouse nights. “You know how you can tell when someone’s giving you a compliment that’s not sincere?” she asks. “A lot of people would be like, ‘This is pretty cool,’ and I could tell some of them meant it.”
After that bummer of a year at Texas A&M, Kay committed to posting again on TikTok, and this time it worked: Her song “Lonely” went viral on the platform, then her song “The Sick” did the same, drawing interest from a host of managers and record labels; Kay signed last year with Atlantic Records, which went on to release “Iloveitiloveitiloveit” in January. (Jeff Levin, her A&R rep at Atlantic, also signed Stella Lefty, the 24-year-old country-ish singer behind the viral smash “Boston.”)
Kay made “My Reckless Abandon” primarily with Alexis Kesselman, one of relatively few female producers in the pop game. “On our fourth or fifth session, I was like, ‘This is my girl,’” Kay says. “She gets me — we can talk about things I wouldn’t talk about with a 30-year-old man.”
The song on the album that was hardest to write, Kay says, was the stripped-down closer, “I Deserve Better.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t hard to write but it was hard to get to,” she clarifies. She’d recorded 12 songs and knew she wanted 13 on the album; she had another tune called “I Ruin Everything” about “how I’m the worst and I deserve everything bad that happens to me,” she says. “But I was in the studio, and I was just like, ‘This is so dumb — this is not true.’ A lot on this record, it’s really self-destructive — like, ‘Oh my gosh, this girl hates herself,’ whatever. And I’m not perfect. But I still deserve better than to feel that way.”
Adds Kay: “Two things can be true at the same time.”
