CHICAGO | The first time I heard Kelly Lee Owens, it felt like a beacon of light smashed through my apartment. My girlfriend featured Owens’ cover of Aaliyah’s classic “More Than A Woman” on my birthday mixtape. I instantly fell in love with her ethereal vocals and the reimagined electronic production of the song.
Naturally, I later binged her music as if my life depended on it. I dove ears-first into her rich discography of four studio albums and countless mixes. The Welsh musician, producer, and DJ has been crafting her sonic legacy for over ten years.
More recent years have propelled Owens into the spotlight. In 2023, she opened up for Depeche Mode on their world tour. A year later, she became the first artist to join George Daniel’s (The 1975 drummer and Mr. xcx) new electronic record label subsidiary, dh2.
Amidst an international tour of her highly acclaimed, more pop-centric 2024 album, Dreamstate, Owens and I chatted about dreams, inspirations, and music festivals.
Dreamstate christens listeners in an electronic euphoria that’s equally danceable and transcendent. Tracks like “Love You Got” are palpably rave-worthy, while softer tracks like “Time To” build into fizzy, introspective climaxes.
Owens shares how one dream in particular informed her creative process on Dreamstate: “I, one night, had a dream that I was in a stadium full of people. It was like…70,000-75,000 people, and they were, like, chanting a melody which became the chords for the bass for ‘Time To,’ so it was like, [sings] ‘Oh, ohhh ohhh…’ and they just kept repeating that over and over again. I managed to wake myself up and record that onto a voice note, and so the beginning of that track was called ‘Dream Sequence’ for a long time.”
Her symbiotic relationship with music informs the airy nature of Dreamstate. She describes music as a vessel to “positively escape.” While escapism could have negative connotations, Owens finds, “…escapism and dreaming [are] more necessary than ever.”
As a proud music student and innovator, Owens views her music as genre-bending, “It’s not techno, it’s not house, it’s not pop, it kind of lives within its own realms,” Owens said, adding “it’s important to insert your own sounds and your own culture, and therefore, to know who you are and know your story…I do feel it’s your responsibility as an artist to do that. And when you do that, you don’t end up replicating other people because you lack ideas.”
This originality has placed her alongside boundary-breaking legends like Björk, Glass Animals, and St. Vincent. Björk’s album Vespertine particularly inspired Owens: “I read that Björk had found sounds around the house when she was a mother. And we don’t tend to include mothers in the sphere of electronic, even pop music. We want to ignore the fact that people can be mothers and also be the best artists ever.”
Owens applauds fellow artists unafraid to push the creative envelope. In June, she’ll join the ranks of Gesaffelstein, Magdalena Bay, and more at Charli xcx’s Party Girl Festival in London. Owens is eager to learn from and be a part of the festival’s “family,” believing that “all of the artists…on the lineup are pop in their own way, and I adore that.”
Kelly Lee Owens’ dream festival? Cocteau Twins, Fela Kuti, Egypt 80, Massive Attack, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Erykah Badu, Alice Coltrane, and John Cale in the mountains of Wales. “I can only imagine the ‘Land of Song,’ as we like to call it, holding a festival with those voices would be powerful.”
Rejoice in the Dreamstate with Kelly Lee Owens on tour now through April, including right here in Chicago at Metro on Thursday, March 27th. You deserve it.
Photo Credit: Samuel Bradley