Words by Clara Kay // photograph by Asher Thomas
Picture this: It’s your 21st birthday and you’ve never felt more alone. The crushing weight of the hardest few months you’ve ever endured weighs heavy on your shoulders all throughout your birthday dinner. When the cake comes, you blow out your candles in a silent prayer. Instead of wishing for frivolous things, you wish for something — anything — to make you feel happy and whole again.
In this snapshot moment, I made a promise to myself: no matter what life threw at me, I could not afford to stop creating. And thus, my artist persona, Clara Kay, was born.
I spent the first winter of my life as Clara Kay forcing myself to come out of hibernation. When I decided to commit to this project, I was terrified. Having been in bands all my life, I had never seriously written songs just for myself before. My first attempts at writing alone were stilted, rough, and laced with self-loathing. I teetered dramatically between loving my newfound form of expression and hating every note that left my lips.
I had no idea how to leave this headspace, until I showed a very early Clara Kay song to a mentor, Pat Pattison, during an office hour. After the last note rang out, he took a long pause. Then, he looked at me thoughtfully and declared, “This isn’t it. I know you have a better song than this one.”
My cheeks burned with shame. He was right. I’d overthought this song into the ground, suffocating its potential. I did have another song up my sleeve, though — something that felt too raw, too out-there, too personal for anyone to relate to. I sighed and steeled myself. What did I have to lose? I took a shaking breath and started to play.
As I sang, something shifted. I felt lighter — lighter than I’d felt in ages. The melody swirled around the room, a little fragile and unsure, but finally free. A smile tugged at my mouth, and by the final chorus, I sat up straighter and let my voice fill the room. When the song ended in a flourish, I was buzzing.
“Well, that’s more like it.”
When I left the office hour that day, I learned something invaluable: if I wanted to touch people with my music, I had to own my ugly side — all of the things I was too afraid to say.
My debut song, On Purpose, is all of these things in song form. Everyone’s heard a breakup song that smites the ex. But a breakup song that acknowledges how both people in a relationship can undo each other? And how this cycle continues on and on, even after the fallout, until they’re doomed to see each other in every potential lover they meet? That’s a tough pill to swallow, but certainly one worth taking.
I spent my senior year at Berklee College of Music creating On Purpose — and many more to come — with the emotional payoff at the forefront. The song begins like a quiet confession, with acoustic guitar and whispered vocals that feel too intimate to say out loud. Then, it swells with strings and glitchy transitions – until, by the second chorus, the drums slam frenetically like a racing heartbeat you can’t calm down, gasping for air until the end.
I wrote On Purpose because I needed to hear someone say it — that heartbreak isn’t clean, and neither are we. Maybe you need to hear it too. When you listen to this song, I hope that you can allow yourself to be swept away by the story, and, in the quiet after the song ends, you think to yourself: “If this song was a mirror, what does it reflect about me?”
When I think back to the birthday wish I made – to feel whole again – I realise it was answered. Not with ease or perfect clarity, but through understanding that creative freedom lives in the mess in the middle. And somehow, that will always be enough.
