By Jim Barber
To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, there’s something special happening here. What it is, I think, is exactly clear. Creativity, matched with inescapable passion, joining together with a prodigious skill set, seamlessly melding with an all-encompassing desire to build, explore, and be an artistic polymath. And ‘it’ in this case is an undeniably special young human – Toronto-based Kicksie.
She is a genre-defying musical creator who has already accomplished and experienced more in the last half decade than many others will enjoy in their entire musical careers. Three full albums, created in a home studio, produced and written by the artist, with all aspects of the promotions, show bookings, liner notes, cover art and social media under one roof – literally.
Music fans and industry sorts may want to keep their eyes and ears on this particular human.
After about two minutes of conversation with Giuliana Mormile, you’ll understand why all of these observations are apt, as the interlocutor will soon forget they’re talking to someone who is just now in their mid-20s. The level of professionalism, dedication to craft, emotional self-awareness, the way she can articulate a vision and involve all aspects of her inordinately potent multi-leveled talent could fool you into thinking you were having a discussion about art and life, hopes and dreams, ambition and drive with a grizzled music industry veteran. To anyone over 40, she’s still a kid (not meant to be pejorative.)
Operating under the professional banner Kicksie, Mormile is all of the above and more. The precociousness, curiosity and fearlessness of her youth, mingled with a prodigious work ethic, meticulous approach to all aspects of music and the music industry make for an intriguing personage and wonderfully compelling artist. In 2020, at age 20, she released her debut album, All My Friends, followed by Slouch in 2023.
Now just 25, her third album, Big Sucker is out on her own Bedhead Records label with a special album release show taking place Friday, June 20, at 8 p.m., at The Baby G in downtown Toronto, where the native of Bolton, Ontario now calls home.
Besides an older sister (who is seven years older) who learned classical piano through the Royal Conservatory of Music, Mormile came from a family that enjoyed music simply as the soundtrack to their lives and get-togethers.
“I would always hear my sister play the piano and practising scales over and over and over, which I think is a big reason why I ended up doing music too just because I was hearing it from such a young age. But the rest of my family are not musically inclined whatsoever. My dad had lots of friends who played music. Once he had a friend who played the drums and one day said he was getting rid of his drum kit and asked my dad if he wanted this free drum kit. So, he took it, and he would collect instruments like that so we would have instruments all over the house, just because my dad would either find them or he would have friends who were giving them away. I don’t think I saw him ever pick up any of those instruments in my life, but he had them around for us,” Mormile said, as she discussed some of her earliest musical influences.
“I think my biggest influence growing up would be Paramore. I grew up listening to a lot of Paramore and Jimmy Eat World and even Blink-182, when I was very young. When I started making music, I really wanted to do more of a pop-punk kind of style, which eventually changed as I got older, but I will always have those influences. And I loved Avril Lavigne as well. Later, the biggest influences as far as actually putting together a career would be Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean, because both of them are not just musicians. I believe they both love art in general and they will build entire worlds around their album releases and whatnot. Especially Tyler, the Creator, he can’t just release the record, he has to world build like crazy, which I love because that’s something that I also want to do. So, I always look to them as inspirations, at least nowadays.”
We need to circle back a bit to answer the question as to why she chose to create an artist name – Kicksie – as opposed to using her own name.
“When I started writing and releasing music, I was about 16, and I went through a few different names, none of which I really liked. But then eventually, and pretty randomly, I landed on Kicksie one day and I thought, oh, I like this. And it just sort of stuck from there. My own name, it’s very long and I don’t feel it represents or gives a good idea of the kind of music that you would be hearing. I feel like it’s easier for me to identify more with having some sort of stage name.
Speaking of the attention to detail, and how she has always desired to be a complete artist, overseeing and immersing herself in every aspect of the business, Mormile is curiously self-deprecating about the, by any objective standards, amazing amount of work she’s done over such a short period of time. And not just the amount of the work, but by the quality, uniqueness and memorability of it all. Few long-time musicians or songwriters are capable of managing every aspect of their careers without sacrificing the creative part or artistic integrity. For Mormile, it’s one and the same. She has a vision for her creativity and is willing to put in the time and effort and energy into fulfilling all aspects of that vision, relying on her own gifts, her latent intelligence, diligence, and seemingly boundless ability to absorb new information and channel it into her music.
“Sometimes I feel like I have actually accomplished a lot, but often I am thinking I wish I could do more and have a bigger impact. So, I have to remind myself all the time that I’ve done quite a lot with what I have. I think I am very competitive, although I am not sure that’s the right word for it. I feel like I can’t just do something for the love of it. What I love doing is seeing how far I can progress in something, and I think music is just one thing that really stuck with me; everything else I did just kind of came and went.
“I was into coding websites for a while and doing other forms of art, and even video editing and graphic design. I tried all these different things which really helped me when I was growing up because then when I did decide to focus on music I was like, ‘whoa, I can actually use just about everything that I am teaching myself.’ Whether it’s doing the cover art or building my own music website – I’ve done it. So the thing about music is that it’s more than the actual music, it’s the ability to also do everything around it, which satisfies the need to just make things and create in general rather than just sitting on one thing, because I feel like if I was just writing songs, I would get bored pretty quickly.”
With such an active, probing and insightful mind, it’s little surprise that Mormile doesn’t want Kicksie to be too easily definable. It’s more important for her to talk about the goal of the songs, as opposed to what label they should fall under.
“The thing that I try to do when I’m writing a song is I want to make it pop, which to me means making it as accessible as possible, but I also want to bring other influences that you normally wouldn’t hear in pop music to pop, and then make it digestible for people. I think a lot of people enjoy my music because it’s pop, so you can get behind it, but then there’s a bunch of things that they wouldn’t normally hear,” she explained.
“At least for me, when I’m listening to a song, with my own standards of what makes a good song, it’s rare that I come across a song where I’m like, ‘oooh, I love this.’ Normally the criteria for getting that reaction are production and vocal melodies and how you keep a song interesting. When I’m writing my own songs, I love to throw in just random things here and there or try to throw off the listener just a little bit. That’s my main goal; how do I throw someone off? I can have this whole thing happening and then suddenly we’re in a totally different key or suddenly I’m randomly slowing down or suddenly I’m doing some weird vocal effect. I don’t ever want to keep it the same or stagnant. One song has to have; I almost want to call it maximalism – just doing absolutely everything I can.”
With someone so focused on evolving and finding new ways to create and express herself, it’s logical that there has been a progression on both how she writes and what she writes about, particularly from All My Friends through Slouch on now on to Big Sucker.
“Normally when I write, I’m writing about experiences that have happened to me. It’s really hard for me to create an idea out of thin air and write about it. So, when Slouch happened, it was during the beginning of COVID, so it was really tough for me to write that record. I didn’t fully enjoy doing it. And I think that came across in some parts. When you listen to Big Sucker and compare it to Slouch, it sounds like I am having way more fun on this last one. And with Slouch, I think most of that’s because while we were in COVID I wasn’t going out. I wasn’t doing anything. I wasn’t experiencing life. And I didn’t want to write about just being stuck inside, which I know a lot of other people were doing at the time. I didn’t know how to write about that, so I didn’t write for a couple of years. And with Slouch I almost forced myself to do it, which wasn’t really that fun. I think maybe I got a few good songs out of it, but it wasn’t enjoyable to me,” she said.
“With Big Sucker, the world was opening up again, and everything’s exciting again and I’m meeting all these new people, and I am going out and really experiencing my life. Normally when I write records, it represents periods of my life – one year, and all the things that happened to me in that year, or however long it takes to make it. At least that’s what connects it all together for me; when I hear the songs, they’re all about specific situations during that time. And as for evolving, I get bored of myself very quickly if I’m not looking for something else to do.
“For my writing, if anyone asks me what instrument I play, or what am I best at, I normally just tell them I’m a producer more than I’m good at any specific instrument. So, when I go into Logic, which is the program I use to build my songs and put them together, I look at it from a producer’s standpoint. And normally how my songs will come is I’ll have one chord progression. I try starting with riffs sometimes, but it never really works out. I think I need that good solid base, so I’ll write a chord progression and then I’ll pick between piano or guitar normally, or synth, as the main thing that I’ll build the song around. I’ll literally take that one chord progression, I’ll put it at the start of the timeline on Logic, and I will just stretch it out until I feel the song is as long as I want it to be. Say I want it to be three minutes, I’m just going to drag it and then I’ll build the rest of the song. I think maybe I will do drums after that, then bass and then vocals last. All the extra little bits come when the other stuff is all done. When I have built the base, I’ll chop it up and this part becomes the verse, so that means changing the chords. Or this part is where I want a little transition to be, so I’ll make a little transition, or make it the bridge. I think of all the sections as blocks, so it’s very visual to me in that sense. It’s a very visual process, more than it is me writing a whole song with my guitar or singing and writing lyrics. I need to have it all down at once.”
With this process so comprehensively described, Mormile then delved into the construction of some of the songs on Big Sucker, including the title track, mentioning that the album actually began its life with some initial work in Dec. 2022, before her previous album Slouch was even released at the start of 2023.
“I wrote ‘Big Sucker’ shortly after I got back from my second tour that I did, when I opened for Oso Oso. It’s very much an ode to being on the road and touring, became my main goal as an artist is to tour and to perform and to be on the road as much as possible. And it’s a song that references Toronto: I love being in Toronto but also this isn’t where I feel like my home is if that makes sense. I just really want to be on the road, and I really want to tour, so coming home from that experience inspired ‘Big Sucker.’ I really want to do this; this is something I truly love, and it talks about how I belong on the road and all that. So that’s how it came about. It honestly wasn’t supposed to even be the title track. I actually find it one of the more boring songs on the record, but I just loved ‘Big Sucker’ as a title and so I decided I might as well write the whole record about the same sort of thing,” she said, adding that the first song on the album, ‘Definition of Insanity’ is one of the tracks where she definitely went out of her way to mess with the listener (it may have fooled the author of this article … he’ll never tell.)
“I really wanted a strong intro song; I wanted something that’s going to be really all over the place. It was very much like I wanted to have the song start glitching out near the end and start falling apart, like something was wrong with it. The meaning behind that is the whole thing about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result. I know I am pretty young and for some people it looks like I’m really just starting my career, but I’ve been doing this since I was a teenager, since I was 16. So, the song is just me saying I’m really tired of doing the same thing over and over and over again. I keep releasing and releasing and doing this and not feeling like I’m really achieving what I need to be achieving or what I want to achieve. That song is very much, ‘well, here we go again. Get ready for another record. This is me doing the same thing over and over again.’ I thought it was good to start off with that song to say, ‘here it is again.’”
Kicksie slipped a little into retro mode with the soulful and a little bit funky, ‘The Mess,’ which she said was inspired by her cluttered little domicile in Toronto.
“’The Mess’ was the second song that I had written for this album. And I don’t even really remember how it came about because it was more than two years ago now. I think I had a chord progression that I switched on to the piano that I thought was really cool. And at the time, I was listening to a lot of 1970s soul music. And around that time, I was also practicing a lot of keyboards, because I’m not great at keys, but I was practicing my scales over these different 1970s soul instrumentals,” Mormile explained.
“And because that’s what I was listening to so much, I thought, hey, let me try and come up with something that is the same sort of realm here, but try to make it sound like a Kicksie song, because it sounds so different than the rest of the songs. I think now it doesn’t sound too different because the direction of my record just kind of ended up being like that. But when you compare ‘The Mess’ to anything on Slouch you wonder, ‘is that even the same artist?’ It’s really just about cleaning my room. I think my room is really messy and I was just having some fun. I said, ‘let me just write the dumbest thing I can about how my room is. Instead of actually cleaning it, I’m going to write a song about how I need to clean it.’ At the time, when I was writing ‘The Mess,’ my living room was my studio and then my bedroom was separate. But now my bedroom is also where my studio is. It’s a studio with a bed in it, there are no other belongings in there – no dressers, no anything. It’s a whole studio setup with a drum kit. There’s a bass amp, there’s a guitar amp, there’s keys set up, monitors and desk and then just my bed.”
If there’s a song that qualifies as a ‘rocker’ or a ‘banger’ it’s ‘Nicole’ which was inspired by a video game Class of ’09.
“The main character is this girl called Nicole and she is just an evil, terrible human being that literally just walks around playing with people’s emotions. But it’s also very funny and the voice acting is hilarious with all the cussing and they’re saying the worst things and it’s so funny to me. One of my favourite little arcs in this video game, and the one that I wrote the song Nicole about, was this guy who really wanted to take her out on a date,” she explained.
“And she said, ‘if you want to take me out on a date, you have to make this huge gesture, you have to do something really big, you have to make a big scene.’ So he said, ‘okay, I’ll prove to you that I really want to take you out by doing something huge.’ The next day, she’s walking outside because they’re at a school or whatever and she hears her name and it’s the guy and he’s on top of the school and he shouts that if he jumps off the roof would she go out with him? And she said, ‘yes, if you jump off the roof, I’ll go on a date with you.’
“He then jumps and breaks both his legs and while he’s being carried away on a stretcher, he’s like, ‘will you go out on a date with me now?’ And she says, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ I think he was the star football player or something so now he can’t play football ever again after that. He pretty much ruined his whole life over this. And in the end, she was, like, ‘actually, no, I was just kidding.’ I finished watching the gameplay of this episode and thought it’s such an interesting point of view because it’s not often that a video game will have the villain as the main character. I think it’s a cool standpoint because you can’t like her, but also you have to see what happens.”
After Slouch was released, Mormile put together a band and took Kicksie on the road for dozens of dates throughout North America over a month and a half. As mentioned above, touring has become an important aspect of her career, something she enjoys and looks forward to.
“Before that tour we had only done little weekend tours, but I had never been out of the province of Ontario, let alone out of the country. So I had to get my passport and everything. It was really terrifying at first. I was mainly afraid of how driving would be down in the States because the cities are so much bigger. But honestly, looking back Toronto still has the worst traffic of any place I’ve ever been,” she said with a laugh.
“Chicago was a breeze, Brooklyn was a breeze, all these big cities I thought I would be so scared of driving in were a total breeze compared to Toronto, which has the most stressful traffic I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was genuinely so much fun. I think just because I was hyping myself up so much and I was so scared of how everything was going to me that I was almost fearing the worst, so when we actually got out there, it was an absolute breeze and I didn’t feel tired or anything until we got home. When I left, I was totally high energy and it lasted for the whole six weeks, and then the day I got home, I think I slept for three days straight.”
After the album release show, Kicksie will then play on July 11 at The Mill Restaurant and Inn in Tillsonburg, Ontario, with more shows in the Toronto area coming later in the summer.
With the proverbial wisdom beyond her years, and such a well-developed vision for who she is as a human and an artist, and where she wants to be, it’s not really blue sky thinking when Mormile talks about where she sees herself decades from today.
“I’ve always had this very specific vision ever since I started making music. My main goal, even when I was 11 or 12, was that I wanted to be in a big band that went on tour. That was my main goal. I just want to constantly be on tour and stuff. I think I grew up with that dream in mind, but as I grew, the circumstances in my life changed and kept changing drastically where something that seemed realistic a couple of years ago, doesn’t seem as realistic, just where I am in my life,” she said, her voice growing more wistful.
“I would really love to continue to do Kicksie and I really think that there’s something special here at least with my band and with the people that enjoy listening to the music. This has been so fulfilling for me. But now that I’m getting older, I actually don’t know if I want to be on tour that long. I think a good thing for me now is to at some point get a music industry job, something where I can contribute to arts and culture in some way in Toronto and continue to do Kicksie but mainly mixing and mastering music more than creating it myself. I love mixing, and I actually love audio engineering more so that producing. I just produce [other artists] to really pay the bills at this point. But, yeah, I can see myself maybe just settling into an industry job or something over the next few years because I don’t want to be at a point later in life where I’m always on the road, and my back is hurting and I’m not sleeping and all those things. Regardless of what happens, I want to contribute to music in some way until I die pretty much.”
With the energy and acumen she has already demonstrated this far in her creative journey, it’s not particularly bold to predict Kicksie/Giuliana Mormile is going to make a heck of an awesome and dynamic contribution to music for a long time.
For more information, visit https://kicksie.bandcamp.com, or her socials.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, Ontario, Canada, who has been writing about music and musicians for more than 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavors, he works as a communications and marketing specialist and is an avid volunteer in his community. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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