There’s something about the songs I’ve chosen for Kimee that makes me think twice about my very impression of her. You see, for me, Kimee has two sides—she’s no Gemini but her presence, her aura appears to have these magical undertones which I can never quite place. (It’s like it’s almost at the tip of my tongue yet I can’t find anything more absolute an adjective.)
The songs are all done by women, spanning from the French legend Edith Piaf to the less popular The Long Blondes. It’s an interesting mix for me because truthfully I found it hard to think of which songs fit her persona so they seem to be incoherent in terms of genre.
Naturally I’d go for Broadway songs such as As If We Never Said Goodbye among others. But it’s just going to be boring. She (we) like it too much it’s the most obvious selection for her. I needed to make something which is new yet still defines her character. This girl has her own language, bordering on queer. And like Tori Amos, she may not “be like the girls that you’ve known, but I believe she is worth coming home to.” Meaning? She’s not ordinary, but supernatural, paranormal, extraterrestrial!
In La Vie en Rose, she’s that crisp, stuttering, grainy, melodious background song playing on the AM frequency on a humid Thursday afternoon during the ‘50s, listened to by grandmothers while wondering why breasts sag a centimeter more each day. In Nature Boy, though she may creep into you like a subtle voice in the wind, a mute girl in a crowd of pleasers, she can startle you with sudden bursts of depth traced in colorful and appetizing words as if indeed saying that “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved in return.”
Yet the love in her is not one that’s Shakespearean. Hers may be romantic but it isn’t one that needs an intimate relationship to validate itself. Instead, her romance with the world is characterized by an image that walks by night, wearing a ballet outfit (complete with the shoes, tutu, and all), carrying an awesome 80’s jukebox on the shoulder, playing Karen’s “Close to You” on an empty street, dancing, tip-toeing—at first people don’t notice her, but when she reaches the chorus, everybody joins her in such prolific choreography like that one in Leslie’s video of “1 2 3 4.” Everybody joins her in song, but when it ends—everything turns back to normal. But you know deep down inside of you (uck such a clichéd phrase), you actually experienced something more than what’s there. She’s totally an amalgam of experience!
There’s a lot of character swaying in Kimee, from one character shift to the other. She’s completely unaware of her own eccentricity, which makes “Smile” such a great tribute to her oh-look-I’m-singing/talking-to-myself-again moments, and “I’ll Kill Her” to her sorry-if-I-sometimes-accidentally-blurt-out-my-thoughts-in-various-European-accents instances.
For the shape I like to define of her, it’s the circle. I can say much of that in the song “Windmills of the Mind,” originally by Michel LeGrand. The music is very hypnotic, even the lyrics move about in circles. That’s Kimee. Purely an obsession beyond reason.
