As you'd expect from her brainy, rambling songs, Kimya Dawson is a pleasure to chat with. Here's more from a brief chat; she performs tonight at Herbst Theatre with her friend Matt Toby on ukulele.
SFBG: So your life must have really changed after the Juno soundtrack?
Kimya Dawson: I love the movie and I love everybody that worked on the movie. I know that for a lot of the other people who worked on it that I liked and for my family it's super-exciting and that makes me happy. It's just one of those things, where this was never the goal for me. I never made music thinking someday I'm going to make it big.
SFBG: You and the Moldy Peaches were making music long before this.
KD: We started making songs together in 1994. We’ve always been an on-again-off-again type of thing that’s what made it special. We made music when we came together, and we never tried to force it, so when we’re not in that mode, we don’t do it. If we are, we will, but we never anticipate it. We never rule it out. I don’t imagine it happened anytime some.
SFBG: How has the recognition changed your life?
KD: I'm the same person. I think a lot of the times when that happens, its with people who decide one day they want to be a musician, and they train and practice. I don’t know. I think I popped out of rehab and I was depressed and on medication, and I didn’t know how to function on this planet, and I picked up a guitar and it made me feel better. The first Moldy Peaches show was two weeks after I got out of rehab, and that was nine and a half years ago. Making songs helped me feel better. And people would come up to me and say, "You making songs makes me feel better," and that makes me feel good.
So it's always been a mutual therapy for me and people listening to my stuff. I always figured if I stopped doing it I might go crazy. I might relapse. It's sort of what kept me together. It was more I don’t want to die. I don’t consider myself a musician: I write songs and I play them but it's more of a community thing.
SFBG: You just played here, at Gilman.
KD: We’re on tour for two months, and the last times I played in Bay Area were in Oakland or Berkeley. I haven’t done a show in San Francisco in, like, four years. I thought it would be nice to do a show in the city. I'm going to keep playing shows at Gilman because it's an amazing place to play. It's an important all-ages resource.
SFBG: You just had a baby?
KD: She's 20 months. She's amazing – now I have this completely awesome person around me all the time. Her name is Panda. We were thinking of what we could name her, I was three months pregnant, it popped into my head.
I just finished a children’s album, and that’s definitely inspired by her, a lot of it. I'm a lot happier now. It's harder for me, with her, to get as introspective as I used to get writing songs. I have to remain more present and write songs, when I wrote songs I'd be strongly affected by something happening in my life, and I'd just turn inside my head and let the wheels roll. Now I do more stuff facing outward.
SFBG: So I wonder, why did you go into rehab?
KD: I drank myself into a coma. Then I was kind of, like, maybe I should stop. Addiction is just in my family really strong, and I'd like to say I knew better, but we all have to figure out our own path. I grew up in this small town in Bedford Hills. Adam [Green of Moldy Peaches} is from the same town, the town next to it. I worked at the record store he used to go into all the time, Exile on Main Street.
KIMYA DAWSON
Fri/25, 8 p.m., $20
Herbst Theatre
401 Van Ness, SF
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