Kristen Merritt: Meme Queen & Funk Machine
The weather could not have been more fitting for my interview with musician Kristen Merritt. As I sat down at my fabric scrap-covered sewing table with my 2012 MacBook all charged up and ready to go and an old college notebook with scrawled down questions, I cracked the window next to me and shooed my cat, Juniper, off of my chair. The air was light and the breeze was soft, with warm, yellow sun rays pouring in and settling against my back, warming the black t-shirt I had on.
Official Cover of I’m Done provided by Keybored PR
As I entered the call, Kristen’s warm energy was immediately evident when her face filled my screen and her first comment to me was, “Oh my god I love your earrings!” Please let it be widely known that she herself had some bomb earrings on as well. After an initial bonding moment over our mutual love (obsession) of earrings, I was itching to dive into her creative process for her new single, ‘I’m Done’.
The original inspiration for ‘I’m Done’ came from a video her friend posted on Instagram of a guitar riff he had come up with, and she reached out asking permission to add lyrics, which he was thrilled to accept. Lyrics came with ease, writing the song in only ten minutes, making this song one of the fastest she had ever written. Although the lyrics have an unapologetically bold message about knowing your worth in a relationship, the inspiration was not personal but rather drawn from the experiences of Kristen’s friends that she was a bystander to. “When speaking about relationships that are ending and how difficult those endings are, I didn’t necessarily have a particular experience that triggered the story behind the lyrics in the song, but a lot of my friends did. This is my anthem to them.” Lyrics such as, “If I leave now, I’ll find sanctuary in myself…” lifts the listener up onto a platform of self-validation and personal worth. These are important aspects of Kristen’s life that she hopes to propel through her sound to reach others where they are, encouraging her fellow humans to love themselves unconditionally.
“It’s such a beautiful thing when people wake up and recognize their worth, but I recognize that there is a tension in that recognition.” Although Kristen wishes she could be the strength for her friends when they need it, and make the hard decisions for them, she knows that relationships are complicated and emotions are layered. In her new music video for ‘I’m Done’, she uses color to represent those two sides of coming to terms with heavy feelings. Red is used as the symbol for the anger and aggression felt when wrongfully treated by someone you care for, and the ego hit that comes with that. The use of yellow is purposely placed not as an opposition to the red anger, but rather as the level below it that comes when stepping back from a situation and recognizing you are valid in your pain, but that self-preservation is also important.
She draws energy from the live version of Erykah Badu’s ‘Tyrone’, taking the bluntness of the frustration portrayed over her dead-beat partner, and adds her own soft ambience. “Similarly in I’m Done I wanted it to feel like there is that level of closure and I tried to include humor within certain spaces in order to make it feel less aggressive maybe.” When asked how she hopes her audience relates to her new single, Kristen “hopes that when they are on the verge of texting that person again that people play this song and they realize that they are processing individually….I hope people listen to that song to remind themselves that, ‘I am strong, I am capable’.”
Her career in music began as a private indulgence, singing alone for the spirit of it, until her friend convinced her to try out for the acapella team at their high school so she wouldn’t have to do it alone. This led to her passing auditions, and finding a home in the music world. Following her high school days, she went on to college and auditioned for the acapella team at her university to follow her passion of singing. Ironically, she didn’t make it past try-outs this time, but that never slowed Kristen down. Instead, she sought out friends whose passion for music that reaches others through empathetic lyrics and cozy riffs matched her own, and they started a band. Post college, like the road-paving, total badass that she is, Kristen strapped her guitar to her back, packed up a suitcase of belongings and a backpack and hopped a bus heading for NYC. With only what she had on her back and a friend’s place to crash, she started the next phase of her life as a professional musician. The legacy of Kristen Merritt’s has just begun, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.
Catch her new single, ‘I’m Done’, on Spotify and SoundCloud starting Tuesday, May 25th. If you’d like to support this artist in other ways, please consider signing up for her email list through her website, at https://www.kristenmerrittmusic.com/. Not only will you get updates on some tasty high-key neosoul funk bops with an ambient flair, but you’ll get served some hand-picked “Piping Hot Memes” from the meme queen herself. What are you waiting for?
