“Polyester!” KeiyaA says, laughing. “The uniforms were so thick and dense.” We’re in what she calls the “studio room” of her Bushwick apartment, reminiscing about singing in the Chicago Children’s Choir. Hanging on the wall behind her is a white pegboard adorned with an assortment of audio cables. KeiyaA, 28, was in the choir till she was 12, but she tells me she doesn’t remember much besides the red vests of their performance uniforms and the dimly lit church (First Unitarian, on the corner of 56th and Woodlawn) where they rehearsed. But she looks back at that time fondly, because joining CCC helped introduce her to music.
KeiyaA’s life in music began in earnest when representatives from the Chicago Children’s Choir stopped by Bret Harte Elementary to recruit kids from her class. They asked KeiyaA and her peers to sing out loud, and if they liked what they heard, they put a Post-it note on the student’s desk. KeiyaA attended schools in Hyde Park, where her paternal grandparents lived, but her family was working class and often poor—she remembers moving around the south side growing up, living in Cottage Grove and in what she calls “basically low-income housing” at 63rd and Stony Island in Englewood. “We didn’t have cable. We didn’t have Internet. We didn’t have TVs,” she says. “I learned that I was different when I went to school, and my friends talked about all these things I didn’t have.”
Around this time, KeiyaA began making her debut EP, Work, using only a cheap microphone and an Avid Mbox 3 interface, which let her record to her computer. But she was also working full-time to support herself, and she was struggling with her mental health.
“I feel like there’s a pattern where there’s always crazy life circumstances that lead me to things,” KeiyaA says. “I was working this job and couldn’t afford my rent, and then my hot water got cut off, and then I moved into my grandparents’ basement, but I couldn’t even pay them rent.” Her boyfriend at the time had family in New Jersey, and she still had the same impression of New York that had colored her college hunt—that it was the place to be for contemporary Black musicians.
“I was in this desperate-ass place, where I was like, I have to drop this shit ASAP, because I have to make money somehow,” KeiyaA says. “I thought, let me just put this up on Bandcamp and maybe that’ll be enough for me to get an apartment and figure out how to pay my bills.” She already knew she wanted the songs “Hvnli” and “Do Yourself a Favor” to be on the album, and over the past few years she’d created more than enough beats to select from.
KeiyaA calls such objects “apocalypse proof,” and from the beginning she knew she wanted to create special editions of Forever, Ya Girl that would feel the same way. “I like the idea of having special small things,” she says.
