The Prodigal Oddity

I'm releasing a song next week.... let me tell you about it...

So, picture a 12-year-old stumbling onto stage; hair coiled and armed with a $200 sparkly guitar she got the Christmas before. The room is dark and smoky, and they’re selling beer and Hot Pockets in the back corner of the venue—a venue, I might add, filled with other 13-year-old girls and their mothers, there to watch the rising star from their little town. No one knows they’re about to witness Kimi Carter’s first official live performance.

Flash forward 10 years, and picture a 23-year-old stumbling onto stage; eyes tired from working two jobs to make ends meet, with a beat-up guitar she bought herself when she was 15. The room is half-filled, and she’s selling T-shirts and old CDs that she never was able to sell when she was 16 years old. She goes home (she lives with her parents), watches her life replay in her mind, and asks herself if she chose the wrong profession to pursue all those years ago. People had a lot of faith in a 13-year-old with a sparkling future… not so much a 23-year-old with mounting student loans.

Why am I sharing all of this (and in a third-person perspective at that, lol)? I guess it’s to prepare you for the story I’m sharing next week with my new single, “23.”

After graduating college and moving to New York City, I came to a point last year where I asked myself what I was in it for. Do I actually love writing music, or is that just all I’ve ever done? Do I want to keep chasing this dream, or do I want to start a new career that has more financial security? Is it worth the risk of possibly working dead-end jobs for the rest of my life? Is my rent due Tuesday of next week or Thursday of this week? All questions I didn’t have to ask myself at the bright young age of 13, when I first got into this mess.

I was at a crossroads in October of last year. My lease was almost up in Brooklyn, I had a job offer that was financially appealing but had nothing to do with music, and I was floating aimlessly in an existential abyss. I thought so much about giving up. But I thought about myself at 13 years old and how much I believed in myself. I pictured that coil-haired, sparkly-guitar-playing kid who had the ambition of 20 adults put together, and I remembered: She believes in me. I owe it to her to give it another shot.

So in November, I moved everything I owned back to that little town, into my brother’s old bedroom upstairs. I had no plan. I mean, I did, but none of it went to plan. I was going to release an EP in January called “Skin” that I had been working on in NYC. The songs never felt right to release, for whatever reason my artist mind made me believe, and I couldn’t put out something I wasn’t sure of. I tinkered away at it for weeks, pushing back the planned release further and further—February, then March, then April—and then something happened. I wrote “23.”

I had hit a wall. I moved home to pursue music full-time, to save money, and all the while, no one was hiring so I couldn’t find a job to pay my bills. I had moved back to the South (where people are chock-full of preconceived ideas of where you should be in life at 23 and also holy culture shock), I was living with my parents, and I didn’t really have any friends in town. I felt like an absolute loser. I thought of all the losses in my life, the defeats, the “could’ve”s and “should’ve”s, the cringeworthy moments that I wish I could erase, the ex-lovers, the ex-friends, the chances I didn’t take, and so on and so forth. I wished I could go back to being 13 and do it all differently.

Buuut I can’t. So, I sat down with my beat-up guitar that I bought myself when I was 15, and I wrote this song. I knew almost immediately this was the first song I wanted you to hear after over three years of not releasing any music.

And then the funniest thing happened—people found me. I went from not even 200 listeners to over 10k in a month. I went from feeling like the only one who believes in me to having complete strangers message and comment that they believe in what I do and the music I make. Even more confirmation to me that “23” should be yours for the taking.

Any gifted kid who has grown up and out of their potential can tell you this: Being a child prodigy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But I hope those burnt-out child prodigy gifted kids can hear this song next week and feel a little seen. I don’t have the answers (if you do, please let me in on it), and I still have a hard time believing I made the right choice 10 years ago. But I believe in you, and I hope you do too.

I’ll try to do the same.

I’ll see you next week.

xx

Kimi