Photo: Photograph of Kimya Dawson taken by Steven Keys of KeysPhotography.com. This photo is licensed under CC BY 3.0
by Miette Deschenes
“You’ve come a long, long way and you deserve to be really happy.”
These are the lyrics of anti-folk artist, activist, and former Evergreen student, Kimya Dawson. With 179,000 monthly Spotify listeners, five solo albums, songs featured on many different soundtracks, and a career spanning three decades, Dawson has successfully made a name for herself in the independent music scene. In celebration of Black History Month, here is a look back at her career so far.
Dawson first found success as half of the anti-folk duo The Moldy Peaches, who released their only album in 2001. Since going solo in 2004, Dawson has released a string of albums. She is perhaps best known for the soundtrack to Juno (2007), which used six of her solo songs and “Anyone Else but You,” a song by The Moldy Peaches.
Juno star Ellen Page recommended Dawson’s music to Jason Reitman, the film’s director. “The Moldy Peaches’ music is very humorous,” Page told Pitchfork in 2007. “It has a hint of novelty, but it is full of so much heart and so much simplicity and it’s so genuine. It’s really unique and it’s quirky and all of those things, but it has heart to balance that.”
Dawson’s lyrics are extremely poignant. She writes with carefree honesty, in a manner that seems like a stream of consciousness:
“To make this world work, it takes all different kinds
We all have different tastes, different strengths, different minds
So it doesn’t make sense to generalize
And it doesn’t make sense to judge with our eyes
We need more compassion, we need to be kind
If you open your heart, you might like what you find”
-Kimya Dawson,“Same Shit/Complicated”
Her songwriting is a natural skill. “I’ve never scheduled songwriting,” she said in an interview with news publication Westword. “It’s always been, if something happens, and as a result, a song needs to be written, it just comes. I can never really hold them back.”
“The thing is,” she continued, “I just write my songs in my head. I don’t write them down on paper, and I usually don’t write them with the guitar first thing. It comes as the words first.”
Dawson is a completely self-taught guitarist. “When I see people cover my songs,” she said in an interview with online journal Monster Fresh, “like on YouTube or something, it’s like nobody can really play their guitar the way I play my guitar. When they play my songs it’s always a little bit different sounding. Just because I think I have a strange sense of rhythm … a strange strum.”
In addition to being a singer-songwriter, Dawson is also an activist. According to “At The Seams,” an interview with Dawson published on Medium.com, in 2016 she toured with #SchoolsNotPrisons, an organization that puts on free concerts in California to raise awareness for communities that have been disproportionately targeted with incarceration.
“For me activism goes hand in hand with taking care of the kids and the marginalized people that need extra support,” she said, “one of the ways to do that is to share our platform.”
Dawson’s activism goes all the way back to her time at Evergreen. She attended Evergreen in the 1990s: Her time was cut short when she was expelled in 1994 for protesting the rape and sexual assault policies the school had in place at the time, as detailed in the article “Fucking in the Streets” from Seattle newspaper The Stranger. According to the article, she graffitied in protest of the administration’s policies and was almost charged with a felony, but after her fellow students protested, she was only expelled.
Dawson has a reputation for being a kind, down-to-earth person. In her interview with Pitchfork, Ellen Page described her as “ … one of the most beautiful human beings I’ve ever met. She was just so unbelievably genuinely awesome I can’t even begin to tell you.”
If you want proof, just look at her lyrics. They are honest, carefree, and loving:
“So if you wanna burn yourself
Remember that I love you
And if you wanna cut yourself
Remember that I love you
And if you wanna kill yourself
Remember that I love you
Call me up before you’re dead,
We can make some plans instead
Send me an IM, I’ll be your friend”
-Kimya Dawson, “Loose Lips”
