New York, NY (Top40 Charts) KAYE, the musical moniker of
Charlene Kaye, has relaunched her solo project with a bang! , "Closer Than This," the lead single from her upcoming album, quickly garnered over 50,000 streams within the first month of its release and was hailed as Rolling Stone's "Song You Need to Know". Her explosive new statement for her followup single "
Too Much" is part music video, part performance art piece-the work of an artist risking everything to bet on herself.
"I wrote this song to make sense of a period of great emotional confusion in my life," KAYE says. "I had made many drastic changes at the same time regarding my career and my relationships and was left feeling totally unanchored, like I just blew up my life for no reason - even though at my core I knew it was necessary for my own growth."
The "
Too Much" video was inspired by Yoko Ono's 1964 performance work "Cut Piece," in which Ono sits on a stage wearing her best suit, inviting audience members to cut and keep a piece of her clothing until she is completely exposed. Instead of having other people remove pieces of her outfit, KAYE is the agent of her own destruction and rebirth. The outfit is made up of thousands of individual pieces of fabric that took hours to arrange on her body. Eventually they slowly fly off, get danced off and get ripped off from an orderly, logical place into utter chaos.
The video is directed by her sister Liann Kaye, with whom KAYE has collaborated with in her work for over ten years. Liann shares, "I love working with my sister because we're so in sync creatively, and immediately understand what the other is trying to express. We shot each part of the song at a different speed, to show how the re-invention of one's self can feel at once excruciatingly slow and like a freight train of change at the same time."
KAYE spent her childhood all over the globe-living in Hawaii, Singapore, Hong Kong, Arizona and Michigan all before she turned 18. Her eclectic musical DNA was colored by her parent's old soul records and 90s grunge radio. For the past five years Kaye served as lead vocalist for indie darlings San Fermin, her electric frontwoman energy propelling their albums Jackrabbit and Belong (Downtown) to international audiences and festivals worldwide. In 2019, the prolific Asian-American creator parted ways with San Fermin to return full and unrelenting focus to her solo career.
Working with co-producer and guitarist Kirk Schoenherr (Nick Murphy/Chet Faker), the release of "
Too Much" teases more new music to come.
