In June 2024, alternative afro R&B artist Takara celebrated the release of her sophomore LP, Moondust. The Australian-born, LA-dwelling singer has spent much of her life as a modern nomad, living in several different countries and US regions before finding herself in Southern California. In her interview with KXLU, Takara explains, “I kind of grew up all around the world. I’m an Army brat.” Her parents met in Australia, and after having Takara, her twin sister, and other siblings, the family moved to the States in 2001. Following 9/11, the family moved back to Australia, where Takara spent most of her childhood, then spent part of high school in Sweden, before moving to Chicago in 2017.
When the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020, Takara’s twin sister happened to be on the hunt for a roommate in Los Angeles. Having always dreamed of ending up in the City of Angels, Takara took the opportunity to relocate because, in her own words, “I decided I would rather be stuck inside in LA.” The rest is history. Takara’s other family members remain scattered across the globe, some in Bali, Australia, the East Coast, and beyond.
Due to the transient nature of Takara’s early life and adolescence, music was one of the only constants she could rely on among her ever-changing geographical location. Much like the varying places she’s called home over the years, Takara grew up listening to a bit of everything. She says, “my mom would listen to Savage Garden and Kylie Minogue, and then my dad was listening to Lauryn Hill, Biggie, Tupac, all that.”
Photography by Orel Chollette / (ig @ chollette)
Teia Ciornei [KXLU]: How would you say moving around shaped you as a person and as a creative?
Takara: “I think, moving around a lot when I was younger… Kind of made me, I don’t want to say a lone wolf, but I just was always moving and making new friends.”
Takara opens up, “I was never friends with people for long when I was little, which I think helped me to kind of just become a bit more self sufficient, which I think now has really helped me with, being an independent artist, and… not needing to have a set group of people all the time. I love meeting new people, and I love working with new people. I just want to meet everybody in the world…” Takara takes a short, thoughtful pause. Her lips curl into a joking, half-smile. “…Maybe not everybody, but, yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t like it at the time because it was very hard to make and keep friends, and I feel like it kind of hindered me socially a little bit, and made me a bit not anti-social, but like shy, I guess. But I’m coming out of my shell now.”
Like many adolescents growing up in the digital age, Takara found a strong sense of community as an active member in various corners of the internet.
Takara voices, “I was [a part of] the Tumblr generation. I was on Tumblr all the time, just like, anonymously, obviously. But then, MySpace was massive. I remember when Facebook first came out and you needed a college email to use it. So, I would use my older brother’s email and [pose] as him…I don’t know what I was doing there. I had no business being on Facebook at that time.”
During the MySpace era, Takara began posting singing covers online. She happily reflects, “the music on MySpace was an awakening for me. You’d have, like, Tila Tequila, Sky Ferreira… I think that’s when I started to just [mess] around with music myself and post my little covers at two o’clock in the morning in the bathroom, when I thought everyone would be sleeping so they wouldn’t hear me… I would post covers on SoundCloud, (they’re all hidden now), but on YouTube, I was painting my face green, and I was dressing up as the Ninja Turtles, and singing the theme songs, or lip syncing to the theme songs. My sister and I would write our own little scripts and make our own videos… They weren’t great, obviously, we were 13, but, yeah, I just have always kind of just done that since then.” With an earnest sigh, Takara confesses, “Yeah… I was chronically online, for sure.”
Beyond serving as Takara’s introduction to sharing her music with the world, spending time on the internet also helped Takara become more secure in her identity as a black woman in Australia. She explains, “it really helped, because I’m a black woman, but in Australia, [there were] a lot of white people [around me]. So I didn’t really have anyone that was helping me do my hair or, like, understand the way I moved through the world. So when YouTube was first starting out, I was [on YouTube] a lot, and I was following a lot of the OG vloggers, like AndreasChoice, Ray William Johnson, and NigaHiga. I feel like that also got me into, you know, skipping school to stay home and try and make YouTube videos, which is funny now, because [making content] is what I do as a job now.”
Takara first went viral on TikTok/IG reels by making coffee, something she referenced in her song, “Coffee”. She began a trend of writing amusing or encouraging messages on clear cups filled with black coffee, then pouring milk into the cups, which would lighten the coffee’s color and reveal the message to viewers. Takara’s videos were, and continue to be, big hits.
Photography by Orel Chollette / (ig @ chollette)
KXLU: How did you start making those TikTok coffee videos? That’s a fun, interesting niche you’ve got there.
Takara: “I was working as a barista after COVID. I was dating someone at the time, [and] I had sent them the first video I ever made, which said ‘you have a fatty’ or something. [Then] he was like, you should post these all the time. So I posted that one on Instagram after I sent it to him, and we just like throughout the day, watched it go up from like 10,000 views to 100,000 to a million, and then it got up to like 9 million. I think it’s up to like 27 million right now or something. [So] obviously after that, I just kept going. I’d go into work at five o’clock every morning, (when I didn’t have to be there until six), and think of something to write on a cup. But yeah, people love them. So it’s really helped people find my music as well, because I actually started off making music before the coffee thing took off. But yeah, it’s kind of like, Lucky how that worked out. I feel really lucky.”
KXLU: Can you tell me a little bit about your creative process when it comes to making music?
Takara: “When I first started, I feel like there weren’t really a lot of people that were making music themselves the way that we do now. I would Google everything. And it would [tell me] I need to go to a studio. So I saved up so much money from my bar job at the time.
The first time I ever went to a studio, I told the guy [that] ‘I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And he’s like, ‘okay, well, just sing the song over and over.’… I think I spent about eight hours trying to sing this one song, the first song I ever wrote, trying to sing it from front to back. After that, I took that song home to my sister and her boyfriend at the time and showed it to them, and I could just tell by the looks on their faces that it was not good… That was really disheartening for me. And I was just like, ‘oh, maybe I’m just not good at this.’ So I had kind of been telling people in my friendship group about that negative experience, and someone asked me why I didn’t just do it myself.” They’re like, ‘you should go check out this guy, Russ.’ He’s, like, one of the biggest independent artists right now, and he was going around on a lot of interviews at the time, just telling people how to be an independent artist. So I kind of just, like, started looking up the questions I had on YouTube and finding other independent artists. And I reached out to this girl. Her name is Ray. She’s big now. She was not big back then. She’s just someone I followed on SoundCloud, and I was like, ‘how do you record your own vocals?’
After consulting other independent artists for their advice, practicing, and embracing the process of trial and error, Takara grew more and more comfortable with making her own music.
Photography by Orel Chollette / (ig @ chollette)
KXLU: Do you have a method when it comes to how you approach writing new tracks?
Takara: “[Sometimes] I’ll think of a phrase or sentence, and I’m like, ‘oh, that should be a song.’ And I’ll write it down in my notes app. When I go into the studio, I’ll open up that Notes app and just see what sparks, if I can fit it into a click track or a metronome, and just build a song around that. It’s usually something that’s based out of reality. And then I’ll build a story around that, so it turns into this whole other thing, but based on a true story. But yeah, and then I’ll build the beat or whatever around that. I feel like the best songs come from scratch.”
Takara says, overall, “I just love the whole process. From pulling something out of my brain, to having other people hear it and relate to it in their own way.”
KXLU: Is your music creation process more solitary, or do you enjoy working with several people at once?
Takara: “I love collaboration. I feel like, even if I do have a song, if I like, for example, my song, “Strawberry Cake”, I wrote that whole song, then I took it to my sister, who is not a songwriter, but has a lot of opinions. And she was like, oh, maybe you should say this instead, or maybe this would sound better. So I just love getting feedback from other people and ideas. And yeah, I think collaboration is great. I love it. And yeah, just especially working with other independent artists, I feel like we can all grow together.”
KXLU: Do you have any favorite collaborators that you’ve worked with?
Takara: “On my new album, Moondust, [I worked with] a guy called Kamauu. He’s… One of the most talented people I’ve ever met. He has an album coming out as well, where every instrument on his album is just his voice. So he’s great. I also have worked a lot with this kid from England named Jeff, and he just reached out to me through Tiktok, and I was like, Hey, can I send you beats? And I was just like, Yeah, sure. Like, whatever. And then once I heard them, I was like, whoa. Like, this kid is talented. He’s 19 years old, or he was at the time, and we’ve done like three or four songs together now, but yeah, I love working with him. I love his producing style, and, yeah, just his creativity is insane. I wish I was that talented when I was 19.”
KXLU: Before you put something new out or get on stage, do you tend to feel more nervous or excited?
Takara: “I get so nervous… I feel just so… vulnerable, I guess, because a lot of these songs are about real situations that I’ve obviously turned into a little jingle, but it’s based on real people who probably know the songs are about them. [It’s] also like, it’s so revealing of what’s going on inside of my head… I’m not always just walking up to people, like, ‘Hey, here’s my trauma.’ But there’s so much of that in these songs, even though they’re set over fun little beats that you can dance to. So… You never know how people are gonna react, whether someone might get angry that you spoke about them, even though no one knows it’s about them, except for them… I just want people to relate.”
Listen to Takara’s album, Moondust:
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