Flora from Kansas announces debut EP with Carnival of Souls inspired "The Ghost is Me"
Flora From Kansas
Announces debut EP on Melodic, out 14th March
Shares 'The Ghost is Me', watch here
Flora from Kansas steps out from black & white into blazing technicolour. Today she announces her debut EP ‘Homesick’ (14th March, Melodic) and shares the brilliant “The Ghost Is Me”.
On the track Flora says - “The Ghost is Me’ is about all the rage I felt in middle school, so it’s basically from the perspective of a younger me. Now that I'm in high school I don’t necessarily still feel these things today, but it’s kind of a nod to my younger self”. Speaking to the video she adds “The music video turned out really cool and I had a lot of fun making it. It was nice working with the director [Marc Havener] because he’s done a lot of work on big Hollywood movies, but now lives in my hometown here in Kansas. We filmed the video at my church which is also where they filmed the old horror movie Carnival of Souls, so we patterned a lot of the video off of that movie.”
Listen/Watch 'The Ghost Is Me' here
17 year old Flora Kay A.K.A. Flora From Kansas has already been writing music for 5 years, picking up the guitar in lockdown. “My dad and I often took long walks to a nearby gas station, where we had conversations about how life was going. It was then that we started discussing the idea of creating music together just for the fun of it.”, Flora describes. On a rich diet of Girl In Red, Faye Webster & Alex G, Flora began learning on Garageband before upgrading to Logic for her self-productions.
As the title suggests, Flora recorded all the tracks at home - making use of every part of the house. Laying down the guitars and vocals in bedrooms and the basement, adding touches on the worn-out piano in the living room. The whole house is alive with music, as Flora puts it “My dad and my brother and I all have our own little recording studios in our rooms, so we kind of go around the house from workspace to workspace.”
Taken from "The Ghost is Me" video
Her debut already showcases remarkable growth, from the youthfulness of acoustic minute-long pair ‘Remember Me’ and ‘Clothes’ to the mature hi-fi of anthemic highlight ‘Wait for You’. There’s an innocence to the tracks but there’s no lack of fidelity or interesting production, with reversed parts & multi-layered vocals. Ali Chant (Aldous Harding, Soccer Mommy) adds another layer of depth on mixing duties.
Moving lyrically between candid and surreal, the songs tackle teen anxiety, middle-child syndrome & high-school romance. ‘Clothes’ is a direct address to a manipulative ex demanding back their clothes, whereas ‘The Ghost is Me’ is a symbol-ridden fever dream of the anxieties of a middle child. ‘Scared Away’ candidly addresses social anxiety, ‘asking for a friend’. The EP closes out with a sparkling cover of Alvvays’ everlasting ‘Dreams Tonite’, Molly Rankins’ lyrics sitting as an easy companion to the rest of the EP.
‘Homesick’ serves as an early indicator of an already fast-growing talent, and while Flora from Kansas seems bound for broader horizons, her debut shows there’s no place quite like home.
Track list
1. The Ghost is Me
2. Wait for You
3. Remember Me
4. Scared Away
5. Clothes
6. Dreams Tonite
