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Summer Meltdown preview: Kuinka

Dan Ray June 27, 20192 Comments
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Summer Meltdown preview: Kuinka June 27, 20192 Comments

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Kuinka performs at Capitol Hill Block Party. // Photo by Dan Ray

In honor of Summer Meltdown, Dan’s Tunes will drop a new Q&A with artists playing the festival for the next two Thursdays. Get excited, and then head to Darrington for the festival, from August 1st – 4th. Check out the first installment, featuring Whitney Mongé, and the second installment, featuring Pheso. This week, we’re excited to bring you Miranda Zickler of Kuinka, a multi-instrumentalist indie-pop group out of the Seattle area.

Q: All the members of Kuinka play multiple instruments. What’s your favorite and why?

A: My favorite is always singing. It’s what I grew up doing, and everything else I’m doing I’m kind of faking all the time [laughs]. But I really love the addition of the synthesizer we pulled in, maybe two years ago now. Now we have two of them. Both the cellist, Jillian [Walker], and I play synthesizers, and it’s really fun to play around with different patches and different sounds. You can really change the feel of a song with that.

Q: Since you play so many instruments, are your rehearsal and writing sessions just a mish-mosh of fun instrumentation until you figure out something that sounds good?

A: Sometimes, yeah. Sometimes we’ll just test out different instrumentations until something works. Now that we have a drummer, [Michelle Nuño], Zach pretty much sticks to the guitar. Nathan really prefers the ukulele unless it’s really not working, and then we’ll switch to mandolin and see what happens. I’ve pretty much taken to the synthesizer or just singing. And Jill is switching between the cello and the synthesizer and holding down most of the bass lines.

So, when we write, one of us will write the bones of a song, a hook or a verse, and then we’ll be like, well, I don’t know what to do with this; what do you guys think? And it’ll be a collaborative process from there, usually.

Q: Kuinka comes out with music fairly regularly. How do you go about creating that consistency?

A: For awhile, we were using Kickstarter and crowdfunding to do our albums and going into Bear Creek Studio and working with our old producer, Jerry Streeter. He’s wonderful, and we’re still in touch, but he moved to Boston. He did all of our records up until this last one. He moved to Boston after Stay Up Late, and we were kind of lost. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how we were going to go on without Jerry.

So, Zach [Hamer] and Nathan [Hamer] do all of this video work. They do all of our music videos. They were like, with all of the experience we have doing that, we can just figure out how to record, too. So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last year and a half or so, just figuring out how to record and mix. Zach really does a lot of that. To answer your question, we’re getting it done so quickly because we’re doing it ourselves. We’re on tour, and we’ll just rent an Airbnb for three days and hunker down and do some work on a song. Everything is affordable, and we’re just figuring it out as we go.

Q: Putting out music on this schedule takes a lot of writing, too. How do you stay consistent with producing music that you actually want to record?

A: With multiple songwriters, I think it makes a big difference. We do still collaborate, but we’ve kind of gotten more independent as songwriters. On Landlines, for instance, the first song is one that I wrote almost entirely; the second one is one that Nathan wrote almost entirely; and the third one is one that Zach wrote almost entirely. The last two were more collaborative. Since we don’t all live in the same city anymore, it’s kind of become this more independent process. Then we come together and do the arrangement and instrumentation.

Q: What’s your favorite show you’ve played and why?

A: Probably Bumbershoot. I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that because this is a Summer Meltdown promotional thing [laughs]. Summer Meltdown was wonderful, but Bumbershoot was a real bucket-list thing for me. I’d been going since I was like seven years old. It was a really special experience to get to share the green room space with some of our heroes. I high-fived Reggie Watts before he went on stage. The show itself was so beautiful, and people were so supportive. That just felt like a really top-of-the-world, bucket-list kind of thing. That was a good one.

Q: What are you looking forward to most about playing Summer Meltdown?

A: Playing an evening slot on the main stage will be really fun. We haven’t done that before. And just being able to see all the other acts — that’s really my favorite part about playing festivals. Being able to just wander around and see other people play and then hang out with them is really special.

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Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).