Canadian singer-songwriter Lindsay Kay creates music that is “ethereal, melancholy, and dabbles in unreality while keeping gracefully attached to this world,” says New Sick Music. On October 5, 2018, the Berklee College of Music graduate released her debut, full-length album For the Feminine, by the Feminine – an 8 song meditation on themes of femininity, written and produced solely by Kay herself. The album was made entirely from top to bottom by a female team – every role, from studio musicians to audio engineers to mixing to PR, was filled by a woman. Uplifting, connecting, and employing women in the largely male-dominated music industry is something Kay is passionate about continuing to prioritize in her work moving forward. For the Feminine, by the Feminine explores themes of seeking faith, the ways in which women make themselves small to make space for their male counterparts, toxic masculinity, the power in being a feminine being, consent, and much more.
In 2019, For the Feminine won Kay an Independent Music Award for her rendition of Billy Strayhorn’s jazz standard “Lush Life.” The music video for her song “Too” – directed by frequent collaborator and filmmaker Anastasia Lebedeva-Delmark and art-directed and styled by Kay herself – was an award-winner and/or official selection in over a dozen international film festivals. During the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kay conceptualized, directed, and edited a music video in quarantine isolation entirely on her iPhone for her song “Worship Me.” This self-directed music video received two nominations from the Creator in Crisis Awards. For the Feminine has been called “a manifesto of solidarity and inclusion,” by No Depression and “a record that gives comfort in hearing one’s own experiences mirrored back, and there is solace in knowing we are not alone in our pain and restlessness,” by For Folk’s Sake.
Kay has staged multimedia and interdisciplinary performances all over North America and Europe, incorporating dance and movement, light installations and stage design, and elaborate costuming into her concerts. She frequently collaborates with young, up-and-coming female fashion designers and uses fashion as a way of expressing the messaging in her music further. She has been an artist in residence at JIWAR Creation & Society in Barcelona, The Banff Creative Arts Centre in Alberta, Canada, and La Porte Peinte Centre pour les Arts in Burgundy, France. Kay has been the recipient of arts funding and grants from FACTOR, The Canada Council for the Arts, and the Calgary Arts Development Association multiple times over to compose original music, develop musical recording projects and live performances, and to carry out independent research on female-made art.
Kay has had the opportunity to live and work in many beautiful cities in her short 30 years, including Boston, MA, where she studied Vocal & Guitar Performance and Jazz Composition at Berklee College of Music, Los Angeles, CA, where she lived and worked for many years, and Barcelona, Spain. Learning and working towards fluency in the Spanish and French languages as a means to connect with as many people as possible is a great love and interest of Kay’s. She is currently based in Paris, France where she recently completed her Master’s in Creative Writing. She is working on writing a book of prose and poetry and is writing her next album.