For an artist coming of age on the internet, Fleeting is a fitting title for Sarah Kinsley’s latest EP, released on February 13.
But the musician, who calls Greenpoint home, is far from a flash in the pan. Kinsley’s songs are grand in scope yet tender and intimate. That idea of ephemerality also extends to human connection, as Kinsley chronicles the darting glances, the brief touches, that falling in love entails.
Kinsley (also an avowed Greenpointers reader!) spoke to us in advance of kicking off a tour of the US, UK, and Ireland. She’ll play Brooklyn Steel on April 28 (tickets here).
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You just released your EP, Fleeting, last week. How are you feeling? How are you holding up during all this promotion and putting yourself out there?
Honestly, it’s been really fun. This is my sixth time around releasing music. It’s not intense. It’s my fifth EP though. And so I feel like I feel very comfortable in my body and my mind now. I feel like I understand myself, and who I want to be. I think my whole life and career as a musician has been all through the internet. So I feel a sort of strange relationship with it where equally, I’m detached from it, but also, it’s a very honest and pretty clear extension of who I am. Like, I wouldn’t say the person I am away from the internet is that different. So I think because I kind of began on the internet, I have a comfort with it now.
But the response has honestly been amazing. It’s been a week since it came out. I’m always just very floored by how people are responding to it. It came out the day before Valentine’s Day. And then I was just walking around Greenpoint and Williamsburg the day after, on Valentine’s Day, and I ran into multiple people who were like, “I just heard your EP!” And that was very beautiful for me because it can be really hard to have a tangible sort of sense of how people feel about music. And the internet has made that also very difficult in some ways. So those were very beautiful moments for me, running into a few people. But it’s been good. I’m just feeling excited. I’m really happy it’s out. I’ve been, like, harboring it for almost like a year and a half now. So it feels really good.
I feel like the whole concept of “fleeting” and the internet and what it’s like to make music these days is so different from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and I do feel like I see more artists putting out EPs rather than doing a full album every couple years.
Yeah, there’s just so much also. I mean, I’m kind of on this journey this year. I’m trying to listen to a new album every day or every few days, which has been really fun. But yeah, it’s strange.
I think people are testing the limits of their own sort of way of documenting their work now. It’s not like you have to release an album. You don’t even have to release EPs. You could just release singles for your entire life and probably get away with it. But I like that people are experimenting with the form or the structure of how to do it. Because it allows for a bit more freedom, maybe for some people. And yeah, it’s just different. I don’t really know what I’ll do next honestly, but it sort of feels like the world is your oyster with the internet being so free and everything.
Do you have any albums you’ve discovered through your journey to listen to one everyday?
Oh, totally. I mean, the first album that I listened to this year was the most recent Water From Your Eyes album, which I was pretty late to the game. But I heard people talking about it, and I was just so curious. So I listened to them.
I was listening to a lot of Racing Mount Pleasant before the year ended. There’s this Argentinian artist from maybe like the late 90s or the early 2000s. His name is Gustavo Cerati. The album’s called Bocanada, really, really fantastic. The Blue Nile is also a band I love, but yeah, it has been fun!
I think it’s harder to push yourself to listen to something for 50 minutes, 45 minutes even. I don’t know, I find that it’s just very hard to center my attention sometimes and having the albums as a form of practice is almost very meditative for me.
You actually directed a music video for “Truth of Pursuit.” I know some of the EP was inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s film, Queer, so I’m wondering how visuals and film factor into your process?
Oh, totally. It’s different for every artist, but for me, it’s really central to what I’m doing. When I was younger, I wanted to either be a director or a musician, so you can kind of hear that in the music that I make. And I’m really inspired by film scores also. When I’m making music, and a project is kind of starting to bubble and come together, the visual element of it just feels very apparent to me and very obvious.
For “Lonely Touch,” I wrote that song after I watched the movie Queer, and it was immediate that I wrote it. The intensity of that film and the color palette and the emotion and the desire in it was so inspiring, and then it was necessary to make a music video that had movement or that was bodily in some sense because of the scenes that I had watched. So yeah, it’s kind of a weird chicken-and-egg thing where it’s like, I don’t know which one started the origin of this first, but it’s sort of intertwined with it. And it’s like, sort of not able to be separated from in a weird sense.
You’ve been in the neighborhood for more than three years now. What attracted you to living in Greenpoint?
I honestly don’t even know. I mean, the first studio I ever worked at and was brought in to make an EP in was in Greenpoint, and it’s the same studio that I made Fleeting at, which is on Norman, and so I had been in and out of Greenpoint sort of during those sessions, but I was so young when I was doing them that I honestly didn’t really remember the neighborhood very well.
I was sort of in the more industrial part of it or I was doing, you know, video shoots in East Williamsburg and just walking around but it was a really different space than where I live now. And that was when I was, like, either 19 or 20, I was still in college also, but so I was kind of introduced to that first.
I was living in Carroll Gardens, and I went on tour with another artist and someone in my band who I just started playing with had lived in Greenpoint for ages and I was just hearing lots of good stuff about it and obviously had been a few times but I had these neighbors in my old building who I got really close with in Carroll Gardens…And they moved to Greenpoint, and my ex and I, who were living together at the time, were looking for a new place just because we had a pretty shitty landlord, and they were like “Wait, the apartment above us literally just opened up. You should come look at it.”
So it was totally by chance and kind of because of them. We had been looking in Greenpoint and other places in more South Brooklyn but yeah, we just came in and absolutely loved it. My landlord is, like, this seven foot tall Polish man, so he’s the best. But I just fell in love with it and then stayed.
Are there any local places you turn to for creative inspiration?
Ooh, I mean, yeah, I wrote most of Fleeting while I’ve been here, honestly, or while I was on tour, but I spend so much time in McGolrick when it’s warm, or McCarren, any parks. I play tennis in McCarren. I just spend so much time outside when it’s warm as a place of inspiration, and then Greenpoint is just such a beautiful neighborhood that I would just kind of walk around and find myself anywhere, or I’d walk all the way up to Transmitter Park, or just around the border, or along Kent, or biking all the time through the neighborhood. That’s what I did over the summer, but it was just amazing.
I mean, there’s so many good coffee spots. There’s so many good delis that I would go to when I was working on the EP, and you just need fuel. My co-producer, Jake, and I, there were probably like three spots that we would frequent. Little Dokebi (85 Driggs Ave.) is one of my favorite restaurants ever. We’d go there all the time while we were making stuff, or Brooklyn Standard (188 Nassau Ave.), just like this kind of pocket sort of southeast Greenpoint. But I just love the neighborhood. I mean, I’m always trying to try new things.
Do you have any favorite spots as well?
My favorite Greenpoint restaurant is Naked Dog. It’s Italian. It’s really good. It’s a little pricey, but I feel like the quality is good, and the cocktails are really good, and it feels like a neighborhood spot. They don’t take reservations so everyone who’s in there, you feel like is from the neighborhood and popped in.
One of my favorite restaurants on the planet is Uzuki (95 Guernsey St.). It’s literally incredible.
I’ve been so many times now. I was really surprised moving here. As an Asian person, there’s incredible Asian food throughout Greenpoint, which I was just really surprised by because obviously, historically there aren’t many Asian people here, but I’ve had amazing Thai food. There’s such good Japanese food. And then there’s really good Chinese Sichuan on Manhattan [Avenue] that I’m a big fan of.
You’re about to go on tour. What are the places you’ll miss the most while you’re away?
I love a good diner, and I love Three Decker Diner (695 Manhattan Ave.) so much. It’s so homey, kind of like what you’re saying about Naked Dog, where you just feel really comfortable and the people that work there are also really sweet and incredible. As a musician, my studio is here in my apartment, I have my piano here, I write entirely from home, and if I don’t make an effort to leave, you can become really cooped up in the process of trying to make an idea flourish. So I love going to coffee shops. I’ll go to Variety (140 Nassau Ave.). I’ll go to the diner. I’ll go sit anywhere in the neighborhood to kind of, like, decompress and get out of my body and my mind in some ways. And I consider those places to be very homey for me too, where I’ll just spend hours there. So I’ll definitely miss that on tour a bunch.
I feel like the food you get on tour is usually not very good. Just cause you’re driving through the middle of nowhere most of the time, and there’s, like, one gas station. So I’m a little less excited about that, but I think it’ll be good. Really sweet.
Where do you like to hear music in the city?
I think my favorite venue in New York is probably either Webster [Hall], Baby’s [All Right], or the Music Hall of Williamsburg, all incredible places. I’d go to Baby’s probably the most if I’m seeing up and coming music or people are coming into town and they’re usually playing there.
I’m gonna go to Sunny’s for the first time today in Red Hook which I’ve never been to. And I recently went to Purgatory in Bushwick. And it’s a small, beautiful venue, but really nice and intimate. My friends just opened a new jazz bar called Close Up that I’m really curious to go to.
My favorite jazz bar in New York is probably LunÀtico in Bed-Stuy, I freaking love that place. It’s beautiful. Or Brooklyn Steel also, which is where I’m going to play in April, which I just kind of can’t believe it. I’ve been to so many shows there, had some horrendous dates there, so I’m really excited!