The light in Domino Kirke’s Brooklyn home gives her a halo-like shimmer. It picks up the delicate and intricate henna-style designs of the tattoos on her hands. These elements track with Kirke, who brings a serenity and spirituality to her multipronged life as a singer-songwriter, author, entrepreneur, doula, and most importantly, mother.
She has the uncertain energy of an artist who’s about to bring their latest work to the public. In this case, it is her sophomore solo album, The Most Familiar Star. It’s been a minute since Kirke’s first solo album, 2017’s Beyond Waves, and pretty much everything in her life has changed. At the time of Beyond Waves, she was a single mother of an 8-year-old son. Now she is the mother of two sons, 11 years apart. Her youngest is with actor Penn Badgley, whom she married in 2017. It turns out that shimmer I noticed might have been pregnancy glow. The couple are expecting twins this summer.
More from Spin:
- 5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Peter Morén of Peter Bjorn and John
- Exclusive: Sublime Unveil First Two Covers From Expanded Tribute LP
- Daryl Hannah Takes Us Behind the Scenes of ‘Coastal’ with Neil Young
Kirke’s journey has been a long and winding one. She’s the eldest daughter of British drummer Simon Kirke (Free, Bad Company) and designer Lorraine Kirke. Creativity is in the Kirke DNA. Her middle sister Jemima is a painter and actor, best known as Jessa on Girls. Her youngest sister Lola is an actor, musician, and author. Kirke’s musical talent was noticed early by her parents who started her on formal training. The family moved to New York where she was enrolled at LaGuardia, the music and performing arts high school.
Her namesake band Domino caught Mark Ronson’s attention who produced their EP, Everyone Else is Boring. They followed that with a full-length, Adults Only, in 2010. The band supported Lily Allen and Gang of Four before calling it quits. But Kirke never quit music. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. After Cassius’ birth, she trained to be a doula, then established the doula collective Carriage House Birth in 2011. She published the book Life After Birth: Portraits of Love and the Beauty of Parenthood with Joanna Griffiths, which was published in 2021.
Alongside all her activities, Kirke worked on what became The Most Familiar Star. She found good matches in collaborators Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear) and Eliot Krimsky (Glass Ghost) who understood the dreamy and layered sonic backdrop that Kirke’s sensitive and serious songs needed. Kirke serves heavy topics like her multiple miscarriages (“Mercy”) and sexual abuse (“Secret Growing”) with a spoonful of sugar that is her beautiful voice. Angel Olsen gives Kirke an assist on the moody “It’s Not There.”
“I want people to hear what I’m saying,” says Kirke. “I meet people with all types of ‘storage units.’ They have to give birth, and they have to go on to parent and go back to their creative lives, but they’re forever changed. There’s no going back. Postpartum is forever.”
SPIN: What made you come back to music?
Domino Kirke: It is my barometer for wellness. If I’m not playing it, I’m not writing it, or I’m not around musicians, it means I’m not okay. For as long as I can remember, music’s been a part of my life. I’ve been songwriting since I was in elementary school. I grew up in a house with a studio in it because of my father. It’s a constant stream in my life, and when it’s not happening, when it’s frozen, I feel like everything else isn’t flowing. Once I started having kids at 26, I made a point, even in the first year, to make sure I was still writing and recording at friends’ houses. Not with the intention of putting anything out, but just making sure that I was recording music, making sure that I was tracking myself. Lots of little EPs were born out of that time, but nothing where I could go out into the world and tour. Just little nudges saying, I’m still here.
How did you get involved in the doula world?
Before I gave birth, we were touring with Lily Allen. We were touring with Gang of Four. It was starting to happen. Then I had my son. Giving birth was this huge threshold I crossed, and it was really stressful. It was an extremely traumatic delivery and I came out of it feeling like I wanted to give back to people that didn’t have support. But back in 2008, 2009, doulas were not abundant the way they are now. My doula work was born out of this void of care in my life. At the time, I didn’t have a lot of women in my life. I was surrounded by men. I think that was also the music world, so male dominated. I became trained as a doula six months after I gave birth, and I started taking clients. It happened seamlessly. But music stayed there. I put it down for a little while and picked it back up in doses.
It sounds like being a doula gave you balance.
The service of a doula, the giving back piece, was the thing that was missing from my music. My music was so me-centered. All the musicians I knew at the time were diehard creatives. They worked in coffee shops. They never thought about anyone but themselves. That was also the age, of course, mid-20s, where the prefrontal cortex hasn’t even developed. We’re not thinking of others. After I gave birth, I was the only one in my age group, in my social scene, that had a kid. I was the first person in my group that was thinking about everything but music for a time. It took my whole world and threw it off-center. Then I was in the doula world. I have clients. I’m making money. I can pay my bills. I’m not asking my family for money when I’m desperate anymore. This is amazing. Then I would feel too far away from music, so I would go to a friend’s house, record four songs and put them out.
It feels like this balance is reflected on the album.
That’s why I wanted to have a record that was so focused on the creative parent. A lot of my songs are about how do you find the time to hold all of it and be the parent you want to be? I grew up with creative parents that were really neglectful because their art came first. I had conversations with my siblings all the time about how when you are an artist, you’re either going to neglect the children at home because you’re still filming or recording or touring, or you’re going to neglect your art because you’ve shifted gears and you’re a stay-at-home mom, and somehow there’s something lesser about that option. Going from one child to two children was my stretch. I can be 26 and bring my little kid, my teammate, along. I can travel all over the world with him. I can pull him out of school. I can tour with him if I wanted to. But two children was really shocking for me.
How was having a second child different for you?
With Cass, it was just the two of us for 11 years, five of them before I met my husband. It was really Cass and me against the world. I could bring all the things that were me. I didn’t have to put anything down. I just had this teammate. He was my sweet little guy that I could do everything with. He came to my shows. If I wanted to take a quick trip to L.A., I just brought him with me. I didn’t do nannies or babysitters. I was still myself in many ways, and I was still in my 20s, so I was still committed to that identity.
I had started writing this album about three years before I even conceived the second one. But I was newly married, and the marriage was really rocking me. All this stability, all the security, I’ve got a partner in the world. It was a big jolt to go from being a single mom musician to a married mother who had the potential for more children because I was still quite young. There was a lot of grief around who I was if I had not been married, who I could have been, who I could remain, and who I was becoming. Also, my husband is a public figure, so there was a lot of pressure from being his partner in the world. It was a new stress and I couldn’t really hide.
It’s interesting that you use the word “grief” about your previous self. I completely understand what you mean by that.
I write about that a lot. I talk about how we don’t really miss people as much as we miss the time, the youth. I’ve lost a lot of people. It was a lot of partying and drugs and overdose. Those relationships you form when you’re a single mom, every friend is a family member. Every friend is someone who’s supporting me and my son. There was a lot of letting go when I got married. Also, marrying someone who was very creative, is there room for two? He’s an actor. I’m a musician. It’s very different. But still, it’s like, who’s on this month? Can we hold both? Can we hold all of it?
I’ve been reading about collaborating with grief and what it means in our culture to be with grief instead of stuffing it down. It doesn’t always mean the loss of a person. Grief means so many things. For me, grief around my identity was a huge theme on this album. My first record was about family of origin, childhood things. This feels like becoming an adult, like being a married mother of two children, and still somehow trying to create art and be current and sexy and cool and taken seriously. I felt very lucky that a lot of the people on my record were also parents and also grappling with this idea of, who are we? Can we get that back? Is it even there now that we have so limited time to make music?
Yes, our children are in school, but the pressures of holding them and being attentive parents have changed. Some friends of mine, who are musicians, say they’ve never written better music because the time that they have, they make it really count. And it’s true. I’m not living in coffee shops and drinking caffeine all day and writing and thinking about myself and what I’m going to do that night. From what felt like a very young age, I thought about someone else before myself, so there’s this sort of catch up I’m playing with myself. You can keep adding children, but do you expand? Or do you shut down with all these adult responsibilities? I think the job of the adult is to be able to hold all of it, our creativity and our parenthood.
How are the choices you are making for your family impacting your music career?
I don’t imagine touring a lot, if any. It will impact how my music gets out there, but it’s a sacrifice I made and I made peace with that after having my first child. I did tour and a lot happened. Amy Winehouse died shortly after. It was a really intense time for music. It was looming around me with Mark’s world and Amy and Lily. Honestly, it scared me. I got scared off the partying, the drugs. I grew up with a classic rock musician who was like a gleaming God. He was really unwell. He was a depressed alcoholic on tour. He’s had a 50-year career and sold 40 million records. I saw the shadow side of touring. I know it’s different today than it was when my dad was doing it, but it made a really strong impact. The minute I had my son, I was forced to make a choice. But I also knew that if I fully let it go, that something in me would die, and it wouldn’t be good for him. Finding that middle has been the challenge.
The collaborative element on The Most Familiar Star is very prevalent.
After my son was born, I started to doubt my ability to write songs alone because of my time constraints. In order for me to really be productive, I thought I needed to work with someone. Left to my own devices, I just won’t have the time. I was too busy as a doula. As I would take on lots of clients, the music would get quiet. I would panic. The antidote to that was finding people to write with. That started in 2017 and I kept doing that.
But I started to not be able to write with people that weren’t parents, which was really interesting. I started not to be able to relate to a lot of my friends after my son was born because their lifestyle was so wild. I knew a lot of bands that were doing very well with the touring schedules. I started to pull away from those kinds of musicians and started to get quieter. But I started finding other musicians that had a similar schedule to mine, similar responsibilities. I felt that was the way I was going to keep writing music, because I needed to find people to write with. I spent so much time on my own that I needed the infusion of other writers. I know that’s common for a lot of people, but it wasn’t always for me.
I have to make art from where I am now. I feel like this is my growth. This is my adult record. This is me saying I’ve seen a lot since the last one. I used to give my power away to men, to male musicians and male songwriters. I have always done that. I speak about a lot of things that might make people a little squirmy, but it feels really important. If I don’t make another record for a while, I’ll be alright. This is enough.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
