Kianna White
Pop Star / Musician
The year is 2020 and the launch of Kianna White’s solo career is a sign of the times. This Friday, September 25, Kianna White will release her debut single, “Homecoming Queen,” along with a music video which she created herself, in six days, from home, during a global pandemic. She starred in, produced, recorded, and edited the video herself, which was shot at night, using only her iPhone and a flashlight. The “Homecoming Queen” video features a girl dancing and singing in her bedroom, in the dark, her face changing into a hundred different people throughout the song, apparently going crazy locked in isolation. Kianna’s production was more out of necessity than an effort to capture the zeitgeist, but “it’s funny how art does that, shows you more than you know,” she quips.
Homecoming Queen OUT THIS FRIDAY September 25th on @teamlovevids
Kianna, whose professional musical career has spanned nearly two decades, began notably as a founding member of indie pop group Tilly & the Wall in Omaha, NE in the early aughts. With Tilly, Kianna sang vocals, played bass, wrote songs, achieved international success, and toured for eight years. Although the band will never break up (“we are more of a family than a band”), they went on hiatus in 2013 giving Kianna the chance to move on to new ventures. For the last five years, Kianna has fronted the Kansas City band, Yes You Are, whose first single “Hgx” played during Pepsi’s Superbowl 51 commercial and who is well known in KC for their energetic live performances. However, with COVID changing the trajectory of many lives, Yes You Are had some personnel changes and decided it was a good time to move on. Kianna is taking the opportunity to use her name, familiar to many, and go solo, well, almost solo, with her husband and musical partner, Jared White, at her side. Their first single and video drops this Friday September 25 to be followed by their first live performance on Friday, October 2, at Lemonade Park, a Recordbar outdoor venue, in the Kansas City West Bottoms.
Tilly and the Wall official music video for Beat Control, Created by Cody Critcheloe and Drew Bolton.
As an entertainer, Kianna has proven that she can easily hold the spotlight, and with her enigmatic personality and oodles of talent, she has unsurprisingly amassed a hip and loyal following, both on and off the stage. In addition to her musical career, Kianna is known for her guided meditations, Magick Dojo, or Dojo for short, and the tandem portraits she creates for participants, Magick Pix. Dojo originally started in 2010 in Kianna’s apartment and was a sort of underground community of Seekers, looking for Truth, and attendees were mostly her friends or friends of friends. “I don’t even know why I started doing it,” Kianna says of her initial Dojo sessions. “I was always doing creative mediations by myself, like standing up with my eyes closed, doing what later somebody told me is qi gong—I had never heard of it—I’m moving, I’m creating light balls, or spheres, in my hands. I’m doing the weirdest possible thing that most people would never talk about outside of their own head, especially without knowing that’s actually a thing, like a martial art or something. I’m breathing in light, making my body turn into light, shooting light out, making light forms, for reasons that my brain understands when I’m doing it,” she adds. “And it’s always for good and for power and for sending healing to people, or whatever. Just my own weird practice that I did at home. And so why I thought anybody would be interested in that, I don’t know.” But following her intuition is what she does best, and sharing her practice with others led to transformative, and sometimes psychically similar, visualizations and experiences, as well as to the formation of a tight-knit community of disparate individuals.
Magick Pix self portrait using face changing filter, Kianna White, 2020.
After this past Christmas, Kianna decided it was time to start hosting Dojo again. This go round, due to COVID, the vibe is a little different than in the past. It is held in a yoga studio, with social distancing precautions in place, and anyone can sign up, whether they know Kianna or not. It is the same, however, in that it is a guided meditation that starts with breath work, then goes into a “creative visualization,” followed by journaling, reflection, and discussion. And although the original, speak-easy feel of the experience is lost, the impact it has on attendees is not, and the group of participants continues to grow.
Magick Pix portrait, Roxanne, Kianna White, 2020.
A reaction to Kianna is often, “How do you pull it off?” whether regarding her attire or her artistic endeavors. Kianna’s response? “Oh, I live in a different world than you do…If you don’t believe something, then it is not real for you.” Meaning, she doesn’t accept societal norms and cultural paradigms as valuable or true. “I look like this right now,” a Malibu Barbie southerner of sorts wearing her 8-year-old daughter’s pink cowgirl hat, magenta faux fur vest, and Pepto pink $3 dress, “and tomorrow I’ll look like a vampire or I’ll wear no make-up for four months straight.” Although seemingly random, there is always a reason behind what she does. Today, for the interview, she is “dressing the part, playing the pinks,” as her current focus is learning to play the blues guitar. In addition to her attire, she has created a set out of her daughter’s girly, cute bedroom, turning her bunkbed into a stage showcasing big-eyed stuffed animals, colorful bows, and all things that glitter and shine. “I thought it’d be really funny, as usual, and a stark contrast to something as revered as the Delta Blues,” she jokes about her choice of a backdrop. Her work always has many layers, and humor is almost always one of them.
Kianna practices the Delta blues in her daughter’s bedroom, which she made into a set for a backdrop in one of her live Instagram videos.
Kianna’s creativity takes many forms, and her adaptability is dazzling. She has no shortage of ideas and is compelled to follow her instincts. When she is inspired to do something, she almost feels as if she doesn’t have a choice; she must do it. At the moment, her effort to learn the blues guitar was inspired by a John Lee Hooker song “Crawling King Snake” she heard on her phone. “Learning to play the guitar is not suddenly my new focus, but I have to do it, to follow those threads, because I realize those threads do eventually take me somewhere.” She may not know how her side projects will effect her overall course, but that doesn’t stop her. In addition to not putting down her guitar for a week, she’s been studying the tunings, finding her preferred keys (open G and E), and has started going live on Instagram in the wee hours to practice her new passion. Utilizing a filter that changes her into an unrecognizable black silhouette, she plays dreamlike, loopy guitar for an hour, and her trance-inducing, hypnotic live videos serve as guitar practice and have become “quite a happening” her husband Jared states. Although you can only view the full sessions live on the Gram, she has uploaded a snippet of one of these videos to her YouTube channel for your viewing pleasure.
A taste of Kianna’s late night, loopy improv guitar happenings, streamed live on Instagram @itskiannawhite
Although her belief in herself is fundamental to her success, I can’t help but feel Kianna has been given a little bit “extra”—she’s talented, gorgeous, creative, intelligent, and the life of the party—so it doesn’t take a stretch of an imagination to see how she may have developed extra confidence to boot. Despite all of that extra-ness, Kianna is not an egomaniac, and chooses to use her visibility to create a platform of positivity, not just to market herself and make money. Her social media posts often encourage people to serve others, love themselves, and practice grace, and she knows that her messages have been heard; “I have gotten hundreds of messages both through Tilly and through my own stuff from people saying “You saved my life.”” Kianna believes that other people are trying to do their best, and her faith in you, the light she shines on you, makes you feel blessed.
In addition to creating music and art, Kianna models and acts in commercials and does voice overs. “I am not an actor,” she declares, “but I am “ethnically ambiguous,” is what they call me, so I get a lot of work, because I sort of fill that essential role in everybody’s diverse commercials.” She is seen here modelling for the Lee Jeans Europe campaign last year.
Kianna’s optimism and willingness to do anything has led her to take risks and volunteer herself for things in which she has little experience. “Insane overconfidence is a staple of my personality,” she admits. In fact, this personality trait is how she first got into music. In high school, she overheard a couple of boys in gym class talking about starting a band and she offered to play bass. After school she said, “Dad I need a bass, an amp, I think, a cable…I had never touched an instrument in my life.” But she knew she had to do it, and she was willing to put in the work. Although Kianna has had a successful career, she’s the first to admit, “I think I’ve tried to avoid [music] because of its difficulty as a profession.” Musicians have to be “willing to forgo so-called security, and scrimp and save, in order to do what we think is our purpose in life,” which may be foreign to many people, but not to artists. “I guess I just got one of the harder jobs, being an artist. It’s tough. You’ve gotta grind and work, and years and years of it.” But in the end, for Kianna and Jared, “making music is number one, and for us, that’s the most noble thing we can do.”
Kianna looks at home in any environment, from Sesame Street to the streets of New York. Actually, the more outlandish the better. “Nothing is weird to me” she smiles. Recently she wore Garfield pajamas for three months when a family visit to Omaha turned into a COVID lockdown of sorts.
After our interview, Kianna walks me out to my car, and as we stand in the street, she asks me questions about my life, to get to know me better, and expresses a mutual kinship and appreciation that we have shared over the years. As I shift my weight to one foot, ready to step towards my car, towards my life and my children back home, she reminds me that the present moment is all we have. That right now is all that exists. And I hear her. She calls me back into the present moment. I replant my feet firmly to the ground, look into her eyes, and stay, maybe only a few minutes more, but a moment that substantiates our connection and eases the transition, between her world and mine.
