Conversations with Kirsten Evans

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kirsten Evans.

Hi Kirsten, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
So, I’m a British singer who’s been out here in LA for just over a year now! I actually celebrated the anniversary of my move to the USA just a few days ago. Growing up, I’ve always loved music. I sang in the choir, played steel pans and learnt the piano. I continued to stay music throughout my entire educational life and went on to study opera singing and eventually composition at university. During my last year of university, I moved to Stockholm, Sweden to pursue a job in film music in which I would assist the composer Jon Ekstrand. I had the opportunity to work on Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, MARVEL, BBC and Netflix productions throughout my time in film music and ranged from working as a composers assistant to score coordinator to composer and synth programmer. There was one specific skill that I gained during that time that lead me to LA and that was the ability to code sample libraries as a Kontakt Scripter. So I moved from the UK (I had moved back to the UK from Sweden during the pandemic) to Los Angeles, California to work for the sample library company, Cinesamples and continue to explore film music. Since living in LA, I have realized that, after all this time, I love singing and that this is what I want to pursue next.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I’ve made problems for myself along the way: I’ve acted naively to situations that have jeopardized my working relationships, I’ve gone from one genre of music to another not really nailing any of them because I didn’t give them enough time. I’ve fought for a visa in the middle of covid and generally disallowed myself to follow my true passion which singing. Overall after all of these lessons, the one thing I have really learnt is that I am so privileged to get to earn my living from music, let alone the music I love to make in the way I love to make it. I have learnt so many specialized skills throughout my experiences and have also been around such a range of people throughout my 6/7 year career so far that I believe I can now just about start to understand the opportunities that come up in front of me for what they are and actually assess 1. whether they are the projects for me and, 2. whether I am the musician for the project.

My largest challenge was definitely the fact that I would put too much pressure on myself to follow a career path that was “better” or “cleverer” or “more reliable” and in reality, I was just pushing myself further away from developing a career as a singer/ songwriter. When I didn’t know what to do with my career, the best thing I could possibly do was continue to say yes to every project that came along because in the end, it all showed me what was truly important to me. I am so thankful that I am now in a position to follow what I love to do and build my career as a singer/songwriter.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
Currently, I have three main skills: singing, songwriting and Kontakt Scripting. Being a singer/ songwriter is fairly self-explanatory but my goal right now is to become a session singer for various composers here in LA and remotely online while writing my very first album and getting this recorded, produced and released. The best part about working as a session singer is the ability to meet new musicians, composers and people whether that’s remotely or in person. I get to exercise my voice by singing a range of styles and put emotion into so much music and hopefully do the client’s music justice. Session singing supports me in the best way while I spend time making sketches on my loop Maschine for my album. I’m just looking forward to getting into the studio with more musicians and playing through each of my sketches to create songs that really do feel special!

In regards to Kontakt Scripting, I’ve been lucky enough to practice my coding skills while working at Cinesamples. Kontakt Scripting is simply writing the code, scripting, for a specific type of software, Kontakt, that hosts many of the sample libraries that are produced around the world. Kontakt scripting requires knowledge of the coding language KSP and is therefore quite a rare skill, although more and more people are getting into it now, and especially more and more women are developing the skill.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
Something I wish I had known when starting a career in music, or really when becoming an adult I suppose, is that things won’t just happen anymore… It’s not like you are going to hit the same types of milestones that you used to when you at school of throughout your childhood. So, if you don’t have goals things just tend to stand still. That isn’t to say it is a bad thing to stand still but it is something that I didn’t realize could creep up on me until it did. So now my philosophy is that if I aim for the sun and hit the moon.

A piece of advice I received is to not worry too much about always doing a bit of this and a bit of that to stay relevant in a range of fields. What I have learnt is that to be truly great at something you need to dedicate a lot of time and focus to it and as you move on in your field and career, people inevitably look for the quality of work. So, it’s also not to say that you have to be perfect at your job or the best of the best but that you do what you do with the best of your ability so if that means that you need to cut down on the number of things you are doing at any one time, and you can – this is key, then it is worth the risk as long as you truly love the work you choose to keep doing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kirstenevans.co.uk
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kirstenhevans/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SoothingMusicYTChannel
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@kirstenhevans?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

Image Credits
Kirsten McTernan credited for the personal photo.