Q&A: From Self-Soothing to Shared Understanding—DON’T PANIC With Kerri
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY GIGI KANG ☆
Photo by Nick Mora
“I KNEW I WANTED TO CHANGE MY WORLDVIEW—and that would come out through the music,” shares Montréal-based, indie-R&B artist kerri. He released his new album DON’T PANIC on June 27, and it’s all about change.
The album is as personal as it gets. It’s about kerri’s own journey of growth. He describes, “In late 2023 when I started [the album], I couldn’t handle being sober. I was still mad at the world for things long gone. I barely ate food for years. I couldn’t be funny because people might hate me. Every day, [I was] abusing my body out of some judgement I decided for myself early in life. I don’t like glorifying depression or any mental illness in music but I couldn’t convince myself I didn’t deserve it.”
While the themes in the album stem from a difficult time, kerri frames it positively. He adds hope through songs like “SUNSETTING” in which he sings, “It doesn’t have to be such a sad thing.” In “SO DIFFERENT NOW,” he says, “I got one life / I wanna live it.” In “MINE,” he declares, “Only thing you can do is get up.” Overall, DON’T PANIC, like its title, feels like long-awaited acceptance.
On June 26, kerri played a release show at Bar le Ritz in Montréal. On the show, he says, “It was really amazing. It felt so good to be doing all of it live, finally, for people. They were so receptive and warm.”
Expectedly, the honest project garnered an honest response from listeners. DON’T PANIC is the result of kerri’s shifts in perspective, overcoming personal challenges, and choosing art through it all. It may have started as self-processing, but his openness evokes connection.
Another element of kerri’s artistry that enables a sense of understanding is his DIY approach. As a multi-instrumentalist and producer who crafts the majority of his work independently, he possesses that unique charm that DIY-leaning artists almost always do. It’s an individual fingerprint on the work that only that artist can produce. With kerri, his signature is an ambient R&B atmosphere which is clear as ever on DON’T PANIC.
Following release, kerri has already started working on more music.
“I’m really excitedly turning my head to the future,” he shares. “I have some ambitions that I want to pursue. The next era is floating in the horizon, but I’m working my way up to that. I just need to continue what I’m doing, not overthink, have fun, and make music along the way.”
Read our full conversation about DON’T PANIC with kerri below.
LUNA: This project started out as a space to process, be honest, and be positive about your personal experiences. Has your relationship to the album changed at all now that it also belongs to others?
KERRI: I feel like I sent out the message publicly that I wanted to send. I think I framed my own perspective differently in life and, for me, music is directly related to that. In times of my life when I was more pessimistic, the music felt more dark. Now, it just doesn’t. I feel like it’s within me—there has been a transformation, and it just shows in the music. Once it leaves my possession, in a way, I have no control over that. It’s just separate, which is really nice in a lot of ways.
LUNA: You’ve previously said, “Self-soothing became the theme of the project.” Was there a specific element of the project that felt the most cathartic to you?
KERRI: I think it was really the whole package. I wanted to do a lot of things that I had been working up to, not just one particular thing. A perfect balance of weird and approachable, for example. Or really stepping up my singing. In the past, I was less developed as a songwriter. Now, I wanted to come back with a big improvement in my vocal presence.
Also the production choices and not doing too much with the production was really important to me. Being unique but not doing too much is a very difficult balance to strike as a producer, especially if you have a particular style. I was just trying to blend a lot of different things.
LUNA: You’ve created an atmosphere with this album. All your music is quite atmospheric; it fits into one world. How do you approach finding a style that is consistent but also has to change project to project?
KERRI: To some degree, the less you think, the better things go. I think any good artist learns to hone in the skill of constantly stepping in and out of yourself when it’s appropriate. It’s very hard to describe. You kind of have to be doing this constant balancing act of not thinking, then finding and deriving meaning from things. [It’s like] reapproaching things and seeing what your subconscious did, like, “What could that mean?”
Anytime I go to sit down now, I try my hardest to not think at all, or think as little as possible. When I come back to it, I often can pick out what I was subconsciously trying to do, then sculpt it.
LUNA: A lot of the tracks on this album have music videos. They’re actually all quite different from each other. The “FORWARD” video is nothing like “2 SOULZ” which is nothing like “DISAPPEARING.” Was that intentional?
KERRI: It was both intentional and what felt right. For the “FORWARD” video, I was much younger and I knew I wanted to start crafting a particular feeling. I had the idea of DON’T PANIC as a phrase. It came to me probably over a year and a half ago at this point. It was really because I literally kept telling myself that all the time. I knew I wanted to change my worldview and that would come out through the music. That’s where it started, then it naturally matured.
LUNA: You have three collaborations on this album. How did those come together? How did you decide those songs would benefit from features?
KERRI: Sometimes it’s hard for me to realize when someone else could get on the song. I tend to explode out ideas—it’s just there all of a sudden. But something about [these songs] was just calling for me [to add] another type of voice. I think about tones of voices and types of voices. That’s how I typically choose if I want to feature. Usually it’s like, “I would love this certain feeling here, but my voice can’t necessarily do that.”
Ezra [Martin] played the guitar on [“ALIVE 24”] and he has actually played a lot of guitar for me in the past. So I just wanted him to be on it with me. The other features on the album happened naturally. It was like, “I happen to be in Los Angeles. I happen to be in New York.”
It’s a product of moving through life, not thinking, and just creating art while you’re going through life. It naturally becomes this story that you can trace. It’s really nice.
