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Fran: So what’s the deal with The Moldy Peaches? Are you guys on break?
Kimya: We’re on hiatus, five years…Adam [Green (of The Moldy Peaches–duh)] wants it that long, but none of the rest of us do. At first I did, but then I changed my mind. Last night I had a dream that I was talking to this fat little girl with dark hair, and she came up to me and said, “Okay, I’m ready to play again now.” And when I woke up, I was like, “Why would I dream that this fat little girl wanted to play music with me?” And then I realized that the fat little girl was what Adam looked like when I met him, when we first started playing music together. I was like, “Oh, that fat little girl was Adam; I’d better call him.”
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Kimya Dawson, the woman who claims to be love’s new vessel, the dispenser of hugs and smiles and playful wit, has a candid, childlike fascination with friendship and begins her new album with tears and death. Her friends are dying. Jesus, that’s a fucking downer, right? She’s supposed to be there for us. She’s supposed to offer up her shoulder. Not take ours.
We went to a street fair with Kimya. Watched some music, played some games, ran into old friends. She claims she’s not always entirely comfortable with people, but it didn’t come across. Yet, you can tell she’s considerably introspective. She’s frequently thanked by her fans for showing them, through her music, that everyone’s a bit distressed occasionally. Kimya’s
nearly as well-known for dick jokes and absurd lyrics, though, as she is for her spilling her heart. Which is fine by me because I can get into stuff like, “Who mistook the steak for chicken?/Who’m I gonna stick my dick in?”
The song about her dead friends, “It’s Been Raining”, (from her new album, hidden vagenda) is powerfully saddening, but she performs it with a straightforward ease that makes clear its authenticity. It’s like one of those times when all socially imposed and anticipated reactions are momentarily forgotten, when we’ve left all consideration of what something’s significance should be, and we break down and simply react to it. Sometimes this manifests itself in anger or depression. Kimya’s been crying, she tells us, but that’s just it. She simply tells us. The song is eerie in its lack of agitation.
Back at the street fair, Kimya won a stuffed elephant with a “You’re Fired” t-shirt in a squirt cannon horserace. She loved it for a short time, then slipped it into a passing stroller. It’s no surprise she didn’t give it to her young friend and constant traveling companion, Buddy, as he’d recently shaved male-pattern baldness into her head while she slept, and isn’t actually living. Kimya and Buddy get along splendidly, in general, though, and she was pissed about the hair for just a little while. It only added to her bon vivant steez, actually.
Listening to Kimya’s music, you get the impression that she has no choice but to allow her reflections to constantly (and beautifully) trickle from her mind. She can’t not do this. And from there comes our support. She doesn’t pat us on the back with some empty consolation. She wants us to grow some motherfucking balls and react. Sometimes she does it with laughter, sometimes anger, sometimes love. But she speaks always honestly.
She has a brilliantly cute outlook on life that’s whelmingly genuine. She’d played an in-store at a small record shop in LA while she was here, and nearly everyone in the audience was compelled to gather round her on the floor, Native American-style. She wore a pink taffeta dress, kitty face
paint and a bleached blonde mohawk. She’d been traveling down the coast with some new musician buddies from Seattle, The Pharmacy. They’d met on a shared bill at a small club, and she’d agreed to play the drummer’s (and Harry Potter’s) birthday party the next day. And although they’d only known each other for a few days by the time they played the in-store, they were already chummy, with the boys singing her backup. She seems to have that effect on people. It’s like making friends as a child, when you just toss all your shit out there, and people can take it or leave it.
Kimya helps out at her parents’ daycare when she’s not traveling in her van around the country. She’s as lovable as a motherfucking puppy but A LOT smarter. She’s hard to write about because she has no singular program. She’s deep but not pretentious. She’s an activist of the adorable and political. She happily takes time out of her time off to sign the rubber sharks, Jenga pieces and retainer cases of her adoring and awe stuck teenage public and promises to join them at the vegan bakery the next day. And later, when asked what she might want Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes) to pee on, says, “Maybe Calvin peeing on a 14-year-old me. On my chest, R Kelly-style.”
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