'You Don't Have To Conform To Be A Pop Star': King Princess Is Queering Pop Music

King Princess, aka Brooklyn singer-songwriter Mikaela Straus, sees herself as a romantic. 

That disposition might have something to do with her family history – her great-great-grandparents were passengers on the Titanic when it sank in 1912. The family lore is that Straus’ grandmother, Ida, had a spot on a lifeboat, but chose to stay on the doomed ship with her husband, Isidor. 

“I think I very much so inherited my romantic sensibility from my family,” Straus explains. “I think it's a hundred percent hereditary. If your family's extra, you're gonna be extra.” 

She describes her debut LP, Cheap Queen, the follow-up to last year’s Make My Bed EP, as “eclectic” and a “summation of [her] previous work and childhood influences”. 

That previous work includes her debut single, 1950, inspired by Patricia Highsmith's 1952 queer romance novel, The Price Of Salt, which has racked up almost 300 million listens on Spotify; her breakout, Pussy Is God, with its raw and honest articulation of queer sexuality; and a deconstruction of a relationship's patterns and flaws, Pieces Of Us, a collaboration with producer, Mark Ronson (Straus was the first person signed to his Zelig label). 

Those childhood influences, then, vary from Portishead and Massive Attack, to Fiona Apple, another King Princess collaborator, and Robyn. 

“I think [Cheap Queen is] a complete step-up musically and emotionally,” Straus continues. “I worked really hard on this record to make it better than everything I've ever done.”

The album saw King Princess recruit Josh Tillman, aka Father John Misty, to guest on drums on single Ain’t Together, and also features Canadian musician, Tobias Jesso Jr, and soul legends, The Dap-Kings. Straus stresses, “These are people who are just good at their jobs, and come in and want to make good music and are really interested in like perpetuating my lesbian shit, my gay-ass shit.” 

While the production by Straus and Mike Malchicoff is the “special, unique gown” covering every song, the lyrics “outline all of the kinds of love and lack of love and an excess of love” that she has experienced over the last year. 

“I was writing about love and my favourite topic, unrequited love – my favourite kind. I was writing about friendship. I was writing about feeling out of your body, being thrown into a new world of being in the public eye. You know, I think all of those different things are different forms of falling in love.”

Straus writes songs in the moment as a kind of therapy, allowing her to process feelings of distress or happiness or sadness. “[Writing has] been my tool since I was a kid to like get through the fucking day. It's a way to live journal how you're feeling, and I'm so grateful to have it.” 

Much of the record deals with the way 20-year-old Straus is handling the increased public scrutiny that comes with success. “This record was outlining my last year of life, which has been very public and very out there and I wanted to talk about it.”

She admits that the increased attention from the public has been hard to navigate. In fact, Straus laughs, “I think that if it's not difficult to navigate for someone then they're a psychopath. Even at my minor level of success, I feel that I have been jolted into something completely bigger than myself.” 

In time, she learned that in order to connect with people, she and her work had to be out in the world and subject to criticism. 

"You really can't account for how fucking crazy it makes your brain feel to be like validated all the time."

"You really can't account for how fucking crazy it makes your brain feel to be like validated all the time. Validation can be really fucking crazy, because you're being told that you're good, and you're like, 'What the fuck does that mean? Who has the right to tell me I'm good or bad?’ And then realising that that's the way the fucking world works – when you put yourself out there on that scale, you're asking for people to respond.” 

Still, she finds a way to stay grounded amid the fanfare: “I think you need to surround yourself with real love from friends, from partners, from your management, from your team, from your family – just real love. Real love defeats all.”

‘King Princess’ isn’t a persona that Straus adopts as a performer. Instead, it’s an inextricable part of how she sees herself – a selfhood she’s been actively creating for much of her life. “I think that King Princess is a huge part of me. It's all the parts of me that I love.

“I think I've kind of always been King Princess. The real thing that I've realised is I've been this person, I've been wanting this, I've been working towards this person for my whole life. And King Princess feels like the summation of my growing up.”

If you were to take the idea of ‘King Princess’ away, she’d be a very similar person, although she laughs, “I think that, you know, alone, I'm probably much more insecure than I present [as a performer].”

Being King Princess comes with other baggage as well – Straus has been referred to in the same breath as other indie-pop ‘sad girls’, like Angel Olsen or Mitski. It’s a label that Straus doesn’t shy away from, although she stresses it’s only one aspect of her personality. She’s also very, very funny, as evidenced by the film clip for Cheap Queen’s title track, or by her playful social media presence.

“I am a very sad girl – you can tell by my albums,” Straus quips. “I think, that being said, we're all multifaceted people. I think the funniest people historically have been the saddest.”

“I am a very sad girl – you can tell by my albums."

For Straus, she avoids labels like ‘sad girl’ by refusing to define herself solely by her music. 

“I think part of my whole thing is I don't ever want my music to be the entirety of my personality – it's a snapshot of what I was feeling in that moment, do you know what I mean? There's also parts of me that are funny and like wanted to laugh and smile. I want those parts to be equally as valid.

“I think it's the lack of balance and kind of falling into this eternal sad vortex that can be really bad for your health. I think humour makes it a lot easier to get through the day.” 

Straus is an artist who stays true to herself, not just through her music. Her move into the spotlight hasn’t changed the way she presents herself online – her Instagram feed is largely made up of videos and pictures of the singer goofing around with her friends. 

“I kind of keep my Instagram as just whatever the fuck I think about, you know. Once that shit starts getting serious, like once you start caring about it intensely, that's when you get in trouble. Because you end up finding yourself editing and changing and manipulating the way that you think in order to make sure that other people get it. And it's like, who the fuck cares?” 

In doing so she actively ignores the impulse to self-censor. She impersonates a girl fretting about how she looks in photos: “’Does this look big to you?’ Fuck that. You have to say to yourself, 'Do you like that? Do you think that's cute? Ok, cool.'”

That same bare, unapologetic honesty is felt in Straus’ music. It inspires a sense of intimacy with the listener, all while challenging ideas of what pop music is and should be.

“I just hope that the honesty of this music is made known for the people who listen. Like they feel like pop music can be honest and it can be unadulterated and it can be true to the person who made it and still be accessible. You want people to sing the chorus always, but you don't have to conform to be a pop star.” 

Pop music, to Straus, isn’t a genre, so much as a “generational phenomenon”. “Every generation has pop music. I think that pop music has nothing to do with what the music sounds like – it has everything to do with who relates to it, you know?”

While she’s reluctant to demarcate a perceived audience for her music, the Pussy Is God singer knows that young queer people definitely relate to her work. 

“I would say that young queer people find themselves at home in this music, and that makes me so proud and happy. Then, at the same time, I’m really interested in everyone just fucking with it.”