Hailes reflects on music as spectacle ahead of Thursday’s show

Hailes. // photo courtesy the artist

Back in August, Kansas City native Hailes, an R&B singer-songwriter and Broadway performer  based in New York City, returned to her hometown for a show at the Blue Room inside the American Jazz Museum. It was a massive success, selling out the venue, and rekindling something inside the musician, which led to her moving back to the area.

Since then, she’s performed with her new band at the Plaza Art Fair and traveled with them to Chicago to open for Solomon Fox on his Sweettooth tour. Hailes also headlined her first major NYC show at Ars Nova last month, and will have her next Kansas City show at In the Lowest Ferns on Thursday, November 20. We hopped on Zoom with the musician ahead of her upcoming show to discuss just what brought her back to Kansas City.

We open the conversation by positing that the Blue Room show had to be something magical to make Hailes move back to Kansas City.

“That’s hilarious,” laughs Hailes before admitting, “Actually, yes. It was phenomenal.”

Hailes graduated from Blue Valley West in 2014, and hadn’t consistently been back to Kansas City until that Blue Room show, outside of once-a-year holiday visits to see family. But now, she’s been back here for three months, and truly, she says, that show definitely started a chain of events of magical situations and places in which she found herself that inspired the move back.

Given that Hailes was doing well in New York, having been part of the cast for the smash Broadway musical Hadestown, it seems as though this move wasn’t just a choice, but a purposeful decision.

“I feel like I’ve been feeling the pull of Kansas City,” Hailes admits. “I can’t even explain what it is, but just something in the back of my mind had Kansas City popping up multiple times, and I have resisted it, but coming back for the Blue Room show, seeing how the arts community has just really developed here?”

There’s so much happening here in Kansas City, continues Hailes, and seeing that in real time, along with the support of the people who came out, felt exciting and untapped for the musician.

“Something that I haven’t tapped into that just feels very new and very fresh and something that I wanna be a part of,” says Hailes, is ultimately what brought her back. It’s not even so much that she wants to reconnect to Kansas City, however, Hailes wants to be a part of it. In it, not adjacent to it, so to speak.

Suffice it to say, she’s hit the ground running, putting together a roster of players including keyboardist Matt Villinger and drummer Ryan Lee, along with linking up with the Charlotte Street Foundation and 90.9 The Bridge’s Chris Haghirian for support in her endeavors.

Also up is Dom Chronicles, who Hailes met after her Blue Room show after having been introduced to the rapper/producer through his More Than Friends events, and who will be part of Hailes’ upcoming In the Lowest Ferns show.

“We just hung out one night and just realized that there was significant overlap in what we’re trying to do or bring to the Kansas City scene,” Hailes explains. “I went to his place and just–instant connection and so, when the opportunity to do a show at Lowest Ferns presented itself, I know that he also DJs there a lot, so I was like, ‘Let’s figure out how to do some kind of hybrid crossover,’ and he was like, ‘I’m down. Let’s do it.’”

What drew Hailes to performing at the Lowest Ferns is the fact that spaces to perform–where she’s physically bringing an audience to–are incredibly important to her because she’s very much into the world-building of her performances.

“As soon as I stepped foot in Lowest Ferns, I was like, ‘Oh, this is different,’” Hailes says, noting that she’s lived in Brooklyn for the past eight years. “It literally felt like I was back in Bushwick. I felt like I was transported for a second.”

Hailes was drawn by the energy of the space, noting that she could tell just by how the space feels, how it looks, and how it’s curated, that it is ran by people that don’t give mentally limit themselves to what’s possible.

“Just feeling that, seeing that?” Hailes asks rhetorically. “I was like, ‘This is the exact environment that I imagine people experiencing my music.’”

For those who attended August’s Blue Room show, Hailes says the scale of her In the Lowest Ferns show will be elevated even further, coming as it does on the heels of her October headlining performance in New York.

“The scale of the productions of the performances just get bigger and bigger,” she notes. “I’ve just accepted it that I will always just be a thespian theater kid at heart. I kind of bring that to everything, which at first I was timid to admit, but now I’m like, it helps in building a stage persona, but also being true to who I am as a person.”

The elevated experience comes about because Hailes, as an audience member, knows what she likes to see in performance: being transported into a different world for two hours.

Additionally, Hailes’ theater background has given her a leg up, she says, because she’s always thinking about her performances from the audience’s perspective, whether it’s what she’s wearing or the hues of the stage lighting. Hailes is not playing a concert–this is a show to which you’re coming. It is something to hear, see, and be part of, rather than just passively taking in music.

For Thursday’s show, it began with a trip to Scraps in Midtown for her New York show, explains Hailes.

“Before the New York show, I came down here and I bought like 50 yards of fabric to build this set,” recalls Hailes. “Drove 19 hours with all of it in my car from Kansas City to New York to build this thing.”

Thankfully, Hailes had been in New York for so long, she has many friends and collaborators there that were down to help her bring it to life and allow the musician for the first time to see the vision that was in her head come to life, and that’s what she wants to build here in Kansas City.

“I met one girl on Facebook,” says Hailes of the latest addition to her team. “Her name is Anna. It’s kind of like a team of us right now, and I don’t know her that well, but she just seems very open-minded and down to help, so I feel like I’m slowly but surely building that team here in Kansas City.”

Hailes performs at In the Lowest Ferns with Dom Chronicles on Thursday, November 20. Details on that show here.