"The Truth Works Well Under Pressure" - Lily Kincade on Creativity and "Cinematic"

When Lily Kincade, a glamorous LA-based pop artist, approached me outside of a Nashville coffee shop on an early November evening, I had a gut feeling that the talented woman I was about to speak to was going to give me more than just background on her work.

As Kincade and I sat down, I got a good look at her outfit. Kincade’s staple look is many a girls’ dream. It’s her reality both online and in-person. Her hair is dyed flaming red. She has perfectly styled fringe bangs, dramatic eye makeup, and is always decked out in thrifted vintage clothing. Today she had on a dark blue polka-dotted dress with flowy sleeves and a V-neck. Over it was a fake fur coat. It’s not a shock, based on this look, that Kincade is incredibly artsy.

One of the first things Kincade said to me proved my initial gut feeling, “I think the truth works well under pressure,” Kincade preached. “Vulnerability is a superpower.”

With an open perspective, Kincade explained to me, “I don’t like talking about my feelings… I’m an only child.” Honest feelings and the truth itself are similar things, but not the same. She feels that being an only child has given her a stronger sense of confidence and independence. In her most popular track, “Real”, Kincade exhibits this independence by rejecting denial, “You can say that you don’t feel the way you used to feel, but don’t say it wasn’t real.”

She creates this balance between a personal disliking of discussion of vulnerability and need for musical rawness by always creating out loud. She’s worked with people who don’t vocalize their ideas for songs until they’re fully fleshed out, but Kincade vocalizes ideas in a sort of stream-of-consciousness manner.

“I love creating,” she states. This exists beyond music. She loves scrapbooking, photography and videography. To expand her creative capacity, Kincade watches tutorials. “This technology stuff is kind of frustrating for me sometimes… everything starts to look the same digitally… (so) I'm like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna take a (photo) on my phone and then I'm gonna, like, print it out and rescan it or color on it’… because there's something about it where it's like, real. You can touch it.”

Kincade’s debut album makes listeners feel physically close to her. The title, Cinematic, summarizes what I mean. The record feels like a movie. Kincade interprets, “Cinematic is the perfect word to describe the whole album. Because it is that. It's not, ‘Oh, it's really happy. Oh, it's a breakup…’ You get so many different emotions because that's what it's like. Your first love is kind of crazy because you don't know what to expect. And so, of course, it's going to be high highs and low lows.”

Perhaps a more fitting way to elaborate on the “first love” aspect is the summer fling feeling. It’s not even about the person, per se, but the time of year. Anyone who has followed Kincade for more than a few months knows her obsession with the month of August. Curious, I asked her about it, “August 1st, you still have so much time (left in summer). But (then it becomes), ‘Two weeks, go back to school’… it feels like you have this pressure… That was this past chapter in my life… You know something's coming to an end, but you're trying to make the most of it.”

The title “Cinematic” is also meant in a similar vein to Kincade’s 2021 EP, I Used to Live in LA, “It's not even the people, it's the city (of Los Angeles.) It's so inspiring. You can drive around and… all the old film stars who were driving here too… went to this same movie theater.”

On the flip side, that rush of excitement isn’t necessarily what the creative process was like, “There’s something really cool about making a whole project because it feels like I don’t have to rush it. (When making an EP,) five songs is not a lot if you're trying to tell a big story. That can go by so fast… it's a lot more challenging to make every song sound different when you have fourteen songs versus seven because (you) don't want them to sound (too similar)… it was a lot more creative in the production realm.” A fundamental aspect of an album is the awareness that a song can truly be anything in terms of genre. Kincade created cohesion (and it’s truly quite stellar) by putting the same effects on her voice between songs and using similar instruments. Much like other artists I’ve interviewed in the past, genres are a flexible thing to her. A song can be whatever genre you want it to be, depending on what kind of production you give it.

The Cinematic album cover

Kincade personally loves turning on an album just to go on a walk (though I have a feeling that these aren’t happening as often in LA, a notoriously un-walkable city). I imagine this is often a reflective experience. Kincade describes herself as “so nostalgic” and loves journaling. She suggests writing for five minutes right after waking up or before going to bed, because your brain is less likely to autocorrect you.

Her stream-of-consciousness way of creating probably works so well because Kincade is an impeccably good conversationalist who seems to have a concrete idea of who she is and what she wants to say. In the Cinematic track “405”, she notes, “The scariest thing that I do is tell you ‘I love you’”. When I ask her what the scariest thing she says on this album is, she doesn’t have an answer. In fact, she reveals that she’s sent these tracks to the people they’re about. She’s shameless in a way I can only aspire to be. However, I can only say that with half my heart, because when I mention that I plan to make a blog post of a reflective list of lessons at the end of 2025, she’s excited, “The only person you can compare yourself to is your former self, truly.”

Lily is one of the most grounded, exciting and sociable people I have ever met. Let me leave you with one of my favorite things Kincade said: “Talent is seductive.” She doesn’t need to say the final part out loud – it’s so clear in her spirit: you need to embrace it.

You can stream Cinematic on all platforms now.