Last year, San Fermin vocalist Charlene Kaye announced she’d be leaving the band to focus full-time on her solo career under the name KAYE with the dancey single “Closer Than This,” the first taste of a yet-announced debut record. Today Kaye is moving forward with the project, sharing a second single called “Too Much,” as well as another impressively choreographed video. With still no news of an impending full-length, “Too Much” is an indication of the personal reinvention that inspired Kaye’s new project.
“I wrote this song to make sense of a period of great emotional confusion in my life,” she explains. “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.”
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The visual was directed by Liann Kaye, Charlene’s sister, and it depicts Kaye’s shedding of her old ways in a pretty literal fashion. “[It] was inspired by Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece,” in which she sits on a stage wearing her best suit and invites the audience to cut and keep a piece of her clothing, which slowly reveals more and more of her body until she’s completely exposed,” Charlene continues. “Even though it’s slow, there’s a violence about it that I found riveting. With the “Too Much” video, instead of having other people remove pieces of my outfit, I wanted to be the agent of my own destruction and rebirth. The outfit is made up of thousands of individual pieces of fabric that took hours to arrange on my body. Eventually they slowly fly off, get danced off and get ripped off from an orderly, logical place into utter chaos.”
“I love working with my sister because we’re so in sync creatively, and immediately understand what the other is trying to express,” Liann adds. “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.”
Watch the clip below, and try to remain patient for more news from the KAYE front later in 2020.
