Songwriter and Performer
Her songs are complicated because that’s the way she sees life. And she intends to stay that way.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
KU was born in Virginia. Her parents were immigrants from Columbia, South America. She was the youngest of five siblings.
CHILDHOOD
KU spent her early years in Colombia until the family returned to Virginia when KU was in grade school.
Her artistic streak emerged as KU grew into her teens. She played saxophone in the school jazz band and piano at home, an experience that shows in her songwriting phrasing and sense of harmony. She was interested in poetry, photography, and film, and she listened to as much music as she could.
“As a kid I was always searching for music from the past and present, all over the world,” she said. “I was never really into radio music or pop artists or pop music. My main goal as a music lover was to find as many obscure things as I could find, and things from the past. When I was a kid, nobody was listening to old music.”
Meanwhile, KU kept her own songs to herself. “I was very shy,” she explained. “I wouldn’t sing out loud. I lived in a house full of people, and I didn’t have space to be singing out loud.”
When KU was 17, her father threw her out of the house for skipping high school classes and breaking curfew, and she spent months living in a car before returning home.
EDUCATION
Eventually, KU graduated from high school.
CAREER ACCELERATES WHEN TALENT IS DISCOVERED
Following high school graduation, KU used her laptop and samples of songs she wrote to record a mixtape, which she uploaded to a mixtape site. A video she made for one song caught the eye of Snoop Dogg and the two released a collaboration, “On Edge.”
Hoping for opportunities as a video director or as a performer, KU moved to Los Angeles. There, fellow musicians paid attention to KU’s supple voice and openhearted songwriting.
Instead of narrowing her songwriting focus, KU kept broadening it: she constructed ever more elaborate vocal harmonies. She incorporated more Spanish lyrics. She worked with more collaborators. She added dancers to her stage shows. And she expanded her vocal range lower and higher, lately even leaping into whistle tones.
KU released her third studio album “Red Moon in Venus” in March 2023. It’s filled with gravity-defying R&B songs that revel in pleasure and desire, but also explore what happens when things go wrong. “I Wish You Roses” which has been streamed more than 50 million times on Spotify alone, is a rare post-breakup song that pledges no hard feelings. “Any love I gave you is forever yours to keep,” she sings.
With her albums, KU was deliberately alternated between English and Spanish lyrics. Singing in both languages – and occasionally overlapping them with songs and albums – opens her music to a wider international audience. But it also reflects her bilingual, cross-cultural childhood.
Omar Apollo, who has sung duets with KYU was, like her, born in the U.S. to immigrant parents; his are Mexican American. “There’s so many bilingual, first-generation Latinos in America that speak the way we do and have the same background,” he said. “It’s its own subculture of Latinos, and I think a lot of people relate to that.”
On stage, KU’s dancing and gliding presence is sensual. But KU recognizes that part of her career may be shorter than her songwriting and singing. “I’m not going to have this body forever, you know,” she says.
For her tour performances, KU “likes a show to feel magical,” she said. “To make people feel like they’re in another place, or to question reality a little bit.”
KU describes herself as an introvert who savors time alone. But solitude doesn’t mean idleness. She writes down potential lyrics every day, noting, “There’s no ‘off’ button. It doesn’t feel like work.” Words and melodies often come to her in the shower, and she records them to her phone as voice memos. When she shares them with her producers, they can often hear the water running.
CHALLENGE – PRODUCERS’ DOUBTS AND PROPOSALS
In 2021, KU had an international hit with “Telepatia” (Telepathy) a bilingual song about lovers separated by distance; it found extra resonance during the pandemic. Her label management was dubious at first about its potential. “I was told that I would have to change the drums in order for it to go to radio,” KU said. “And I was like, ‘No, I’m OK. I’d rather not go to radio than change my song.”
The song swept across TikTok anyway, and requests pushed it onto radio. By now it has been streamed more than a billion times on Spotify and YouTube.
CAREER SATISFACTION
“I like to think of myself as someone who is very transparent,” says KU. “When it comes to music, I can talk honestly about all my deepest feelings. I’m never going to lie about anything. I try to put all my inner-most thoughts in my music.”
“Anybody who looks up to me, I try to just show them to be themselves. To not subject themselves to feeling like they must do what other people tell them to do. To be on their own paths and not let anybody try to control that path. It’s important to be able to express the parts of you that are human.”
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This career story is based on a news article about the songwriter Kali Uchis, written by Jon Pareles, published by The New York Times on April 20, 2023.
