Uchis refuses to water down music for masses
Colombian American songwriter mixes aesthetics, languages
On the main stage of Coachella, stars bring out guests to parade their connections and inspirations. In the first minutes of her recent performance at the festival, Colombian American songwriter Kali Uchis flaunted three quick cameos: Don Toliver, Omar Apollo and Tyler, the Creator.
Those duets — and a bilingual set that included her hits, some reggaeton favorites and an unreleased song from her next album — were a show of Uchis’ far-reaching musical and personal affinities: to R&B, pop, hip-hop, dance music and Latin roots. (Toliver, a rapper from Texas, is also her boyfriend.)
“I have so many different things that I am,” Uchis, 28, said in an interview a few days before the show. “In order to become marketable on a mass or mainstream scale, you have to water yourself down as a person, as an artist, because that’s what the masses can understand. But it’s always been important for me to just be myself, to keep my soul intact as much as I can.
“In this industry, there are so many ways to lose yourself as a person. But I think it’s important that you’re not trying to compromise what you have going on as an artist.”
Uchis had just returned from playing Lollapalooza festivals in South America, and she was in rehearsals for Coachella and her headlining tour, which recently started in Austin, Texas.
“I like a show to feel magical,” she said, “to make people feel like they’re in another place, or to question reality a little bit.”
Uchis describes herself as an introvert who savors time alone. But solitude doesn’t mean idleness. She writes down potential lyrics every day, noting, “There’s no ‘off ’ button. It doesn’t feel like work.” Words and melodies often come to her in the shower, and she records them to her phone as voice memos. When she shares them with her producers, they can often hear the water running.
Her third studio album, “Red Moon in Venus,” released in March, is filled with gravity-defying R&B songs that revel in pleasure and desire, but also explore what happens when things go wrong. “I Wish You Roses,” which has been streamed more than 50 million times on Spotify alone, is a rare postbreakup song that pledges no hard feelings: “Any love I gave you is forever yours to keep,” she sings.
Uchis has already recorded her fourth album, with songs in Spanish and, as her Coachella premiere suggests, upfront Latin rhythms; the new song was a tearful, vintage-flavored bolero. She plans to start releasing the new tracks in Spanish this summer.
Apollo, who has sung duets with Uchis, was, like Uchis, born in the U.S. to immigrant parents; his are Mexican American.
“There’s so many bilingual, first-generation Latinos in America that speak the way we do and have the same background,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s its own subculture of Latinos, and I think a lot of people relate to that.”
But what led to his friendship and collaborations with Uchis, Apollo said, was simply hearing the sound of her voice on her early recordings, which she uploaded to SoundCloud in the mid-2010s.
“Her tone, it’s beautiful and riveting,” he said. “She has a song called ‘Melting,’ and it sounds like you’re just melting.”
Uchis was born KarlyMarina Loaiza in Virginia, the youngest of five siblings; Kali Uchis was a childhood nickname. She spent her early years in Pereira, her parents’ hometown in Colombia; the family returned to Virginia while she was in grade school.
Her artistic streak emerged as she grew into her teens. She played saxophone in the school jazz band and piano at home, experience that shows in her phrasing and sense of harmony. She was interested in poetry, photography and film, and she listened to as much music as she could.
“As a kid, I was just always searching for music from the past and present, all over the world,” she said. “I was never really into radio music or pop artists or pop music. My main goal as a music lover was to find as many obscure things as I could find, and things from the past. As a kid, nobody was listening to old music.”
Meanwhile, she kept her own songs to herself. “I was very shy,” she explained. “I wouldn’t sing out loud. I lived in a house full of people, and I didn’t have space to be singing out loud.”
When Uchis was 17, her father threw her out of the house for skipping classes and breaking curfew, and she spent months living in her car before returning home. She used her laptop and samples to record a mixtape, “Drunken Babble,” and uploaded it to the mixtape site DatPiff in
2012, soon after graduating from high school.
A video she made for one song, “What They Say,” caught the eye of Snoop Dogg, and the two released a collaboration, “On Edge,” in 2014. Hoping for opportunities as a video director or performer, Uchis moved to Los Angeles.
Fellow musicians paid attention to her supple voice and openhearted songwriting. Her debut EP in 2015, “Por Vida,” enlisted Diplo, Kaytranada and Tyler, the Creator as producers. (Uchis would later win a Grammy for best dance recording for “10%” with Kaytranada.)
Instead of narrowing her focus, Uchis kept broadening it. She constructed ever more elaborate vocal
harmonies. She incorporated more Spanish lyrics. She worked with more collaborators, among them Gorillaz, SZA, Juanes, Little Dragon, Daniel Caesar and Jorja Smith. She added dancers to her stage shows. And she expanded her vocal range lower and higher, lately even leaping into whistle tones.
In 2021, Uchis had an international hit with “Telepatia” (“Telepathy”), a bilingual song about lovers separated by distance; it found extra resonance during the pandemic. Her label was dubious at first about its potential.
“I was told that I would have to change the drums in order for it to go to radio,” Uchis said. “And I* was like, ‘No, I’m OK. I’d rather not go to radio than change my song.’ ”
The song swept across TikTok anyway, and requests pushed it onto radio. By now, it has been streamed more than
1 billion times on Spotify and YouTube.
The songs on “Red Moon in Venus” exult in physical and emotional closeness, but they also examine tensions and power dynamics.
“I like to think of myself as someone who is very transparent,” she said. “When it comes to music I can talk honestly about all of my deepest feelings. I’m never going to lie about anything. I try to put all my innermost thoughts in my music.”