Meet Kim Logan of Hollywood/Echo Park

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kim Logan

Hi Kim, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I grew up as an opera singer. I started singing classically when I was 9, and ended up doing it professionally with the Sarasota and Nashville Opera companies for 17 years… all the way up until my touring schedule with my own music got too busy to stay in one place for the several weeks it takes to commit to an opera production.

I moved overseas in 2018 to tour the UK and Europe, and now find myself between the UK, LA, and my family in the northeast. Los Angeles has become the most pleasant surprise of a creative home for me in the last few years… without my LA community I would never have been able to come around to the most important artistic breakthroughs of my career. I’ve always had trouble sitting still, but I cherish my time in California.

Most recently in 2023, I had a dramatic shift in artistic perspective as my Saturn Return concluded. In the last couple of years I’ve been hyper-focused on the evolution of my songwriting, production, and even my vocals… I’m finally starting to release the songs from my third album, slowly and ceremonially, debuting this new sound that’s something totally different to what I’ve done before. It’s an exciting moment.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I don’t think anything sacred or worthwhile is ever smooth. I, along with most of my generation of millennials, have been met with constant pushback, oppression, and a rigged economy ever since I started my artistic career, not to mention the never-ending pitfalls inherent in moving through the music industry as a woman.

The main struggle is the fact that I’ve had to work around a legislative and financial system that has fundamentally devalued music and art, opting instead to give songwriters’ and artists’ money away to predatory and exploitative CEOs. Everyone is operating under this system, this diseased music-business-microcosm of the macrocosm that is the Uni-Party government, which has transferred wealth steadily from the creative classes to the tech and finance classes since the Reagan era. Everyone knows this and is dealing with it. We’re only just now beginning to loudly talk about it, and that’s thrilling.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I came up in the Nashville scene in the mid-2010s when we were having the massive Americana boom, which I was much too “rock” for at the time. It made me feel so reactionary, and drove my music to an even heavier and darker place… I had a great time for years making sort of Southern-Gothic-psych-rock that was deeply rooted in the blues. I was very lucky to be seen and supported by people like Vance Powell and Dominic Davis, two of the most integral players in the brilliant circle of musicians behind Jack White, and they helped me a lot to get my career off the ground. What they helped me most to see though, was probably just that artistically doing what I want rather than what the business or society wants from me, was and is always going to be the truest and best choice.

This new trip I’ve been on was brought about by a hard return to the ’90s and Y2K music I grew up on, the first music that made me realize I was compelled to write songs and world-build around my creative vision. Opera has always informed my interdisciplinary outlook on my work, and I think the gothy theatricality of the grunge, garage-rock, industrial, trip-hop, shoegaze, and even “indie sleaze” music that was coming out for that magical decade or so was more formative on my artistic psyche than I was able to explore in the earliest parts of my career. Nashville, Paris, some of London, and some of the other biggest music scenes in the world are totally running on pastiche, this worship of the 1960s and 1970s that feels really regressive and circular to me. I woke up one day and all of that deeply gave me the ick… I started making the music I wanted to hear, heavy guitars mixed with drum machines and synths, and I’ve not looked back. I don’t want to hear or write lyrics about old-fashioned or inane topics anymore. We have much more important things to express right now.

I’m probably most proud of the work I’ve created in these last 2 years, starting with “Half Life,” the single which just dropped in January. My producer Rex Roulette and I spent so much time in LA and London tinkering away at trying to make something that felt completely fresh, which is one of the hardest things to do these days. I’m proud that I was able to drop pretense and be vulnerable enough to essentially start working from building blocks again, learning DAWs and how to play bass and how to express what I want and need from a studio environment. I can’t wait to share the rest of the album.

What matters most to you? Why?
Love. Truth. Art. I think after turning 30 your brain and soul start to innately understand that what doesn’t serve you anymore shouldn’t get your energy anymore, and if you tune into that station you can really start to create the life you’re supposed to have.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimlogansilhouettes/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kimlogansilhouettes
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kimlogansilhouettes

Image Credits
First image & image from “Half Life” graphic by Alex Fuhr, Los Angeles 2024.

Other 3 images by Shari Montagnana, London 2024.