We've been obsessed with Danish alt-pop up-and-comer Ea Kaya after stumbling across her impressive single 'Talking'. To celebrate the release of her debut EP Fragile But Strong As Hell, which was released last month, Ea Kaya takes us through the story behind each of the tracks that feature on the release.
'4 AM':
For a little while, I was dating an overly artsy, slightly arrogant guy that all of my friends hated. He wrote me messages the size of a novel and invited me to join him on his many intellectual travels. But he also kept calling me up at shit o’clock in the morning on a night out. I got tired of mixed signals. I honestly didn’t have any feelings at all for this guy — I just thought he was interesting. I had an awful taste in guys at the time and I loved a challenge. But I did not fancy being a break of dawn booty call. As you might’ve guessed, he was the inspiration for '4 AM'.
'Easy' & 'Tied Up':
The melodies for 'Tied Up' and 'Easy' were created in LA, but the stories are about a situation I had back home in Copenhagen at the time. The lyrical inspiration was written on a plane somewhere between those two destinations. I can’t sleep on planes, so I basically had half a day to do nothing but write or torture my A&R with all of my worst demos from ancient times. It’s a classic to experience a sense of mental clarity when you’re sitting there, high up in the air with nothing but sweaty strangers and fluffy clouds around you. But I’ve rarely written that much, that fast. The result of this trip was nothing but songs about my relationship. I’m quite certain my A&R had regrets that he came with me in the first place.
'Remedy':
'Remedy' is still one of my personal favorites to date. This song was created a hundred years ago in my friend Joachim's bedroom. He randomly brought one of his great friends, Frederik, to the session and that cocktail turned out to be perfect. None of us had much experience at the time — we were just a bunch of amateurs that loved to write. We drank endless amounts of black coffee and I recorded the dustiest vocals on earth in his home-built microphone booth with a duvet over my head to reduce the amount of background noise.
'Don't Complicate It':
'Don’t Complicate It' was written in an old basement underneath a mental hospital. This was one of my first sessions ever and I can’t deny I was convinced I’d voluntarily walked right into a serial killer’s cave. What proved me wrong though, was that he had a cardboard figure of Harry Styles standing in his corner, smiling encouragingly as we wrote the song. While waiting for the train on the way home, lyrical ideas started popping up in my head. These ideas became one very long, detailed rant about the first guy I ever fell in love with. It was really strange. There was no reason for me to think of him at that time, as I hadn’t seen him for years. The whole chorus “I say it like it is…” is basically the exact lines from the note that I created on my phone - and in the right order.
'Talking':
When I wrote 'Talking', I’d been confronted with my inability to open up to people. I remember having an extremely rough day and I could feel my eyes starting to itch, as I sat on my boyfriend’s bed. I’ve always been reserved and kept my insecurities to myself, but suddenly I couldn’t hide it when something was wrong. I refused to talk to him. Actually, I even refused to talk to him about why I didn’t want to talk to him. That’s why I went home and started writing him an explanation through a song instead.
You can check out Fragile But Strong As Hell by Ea Kaya below:
