Innovation in Adversity: Kaki King Prevails in Modern Yesterdays

By Daniel Corey

By Daniel CoreyKaki King is one of the most exciting and innovative guitarists working today. Hailed by Rolling Stone as “a genre unto herself,” King is as prolific as she is unique, having released ten albums, created two groundbreaking multimedia live shows, and received a Golden Globe nomination for her work scoring the 2008 feature film Into the Wild. King’s latest album, Modern Yesterdays, is a companion piece to her latest live show, Data Not Found. I had a chance to speak with King about the project. I learned quite a bit about her ingenuity and craft, as well as the difficulties of creating an album during a pandemic.

With the Data Not Found show, were you building on some of the concepts from your previous multimedia project, The Neck is a Bridge to the Body?

One of the things that I brought in from The Neck was the projection of video images onto the guitar, except that it was more of a feature than the main event this time.

Let’s talk about the latest album, Modern Yesterdays. The title itself is an interesting irony, and the cover photo is a really excellently visceral, angry image of you. I like it a lot. Is it safe to say you’re expressing some feeling about the notable events of 2020 here?

No. In fact, I don’t think I look angry. I think I look hot. (Laughter) I look like a total babe that just got shoved into the sand. This was all pre-pandemic. The album features a large group of songs that were in Data Not Found. So

it’s not exactly the soundtrack, but it is a companion piece. Data Not Found also happens to feature a lot of sand and beachy, desert-y imagery. That was going to be my big project. I went into the studio to make Modern Yesterdays on March 2nd and finished before lockdown, except for the last mix. I had ideas and demos worked out. It was going to be fairly cut-and-dry. I was making the album with my sound designer from Data Not Found, Chloe Thompson. Then coronavirus happened. So what seemed to be kind of an average, “spend a couple of weeks in the studio, bang a record out, have a little fun,” became really intense. I won’t say the album itself was difficult because it poured right out, but the time period was insane, and we all ended up getting COVID, anyway.

Right off the bat, the album takes off like a rollercoaster with the opener, “Default Shell.” are you speaking of the human body?

I’ll just Google-search whatever—I like little strange word combinations. It’s some term for a particular kind of coding. But I thought, “Oh, the default shell. That’s the human body.” That’s sort of the place where we have to start from. And slowly over time, we roboticize ourselves in one way or another.

Photo by Ebru Yildiz