KEEN FOR KINA

One minute Kina Grannis was strumming her guitar to make a living. The next she was a nationwide contest winner. And then things got really weird...

If you’ve spent any time on YouTube checking out musical talent over the last decade, there’s a good chance you’ve seen Kina Grannis. In one video, she’s playfully skipping through the California beaches with friend David Choi. During another, she’s harmonizing with Canadian band Boyce Avenue. In yet another, she’s strumming a guitar with the blonde Gardiner sisters as they sing sweet harmonies that resemble musical candy. Grannis, who doesn’t seem to have met a chart-topping pop song she couldn’t retool into a honeyed acoustic pop song, has now made over 350 videos and is the perfect ambassador for the power of social media.

In some ways, it’s helped make her who she is today. For much of her early singing career, the Mission Viejo, California native was, in her own words, “doing the starving artist thing, singing in open mic nights”. Then, in 2007, she stumbled on a nationwide talent competition called “Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Contest”, sponsored by the U.S. chip company Frito-Lay.

Via audience votes, Grannis surprisingly made it into the nationwide top 10, after which she started experimenting with the relatively new YouTube platform to see how she could make the participation process fun for other people. “At some point it started exploding, and that’s when I realized that I stumbled on something very powerful,” she says to me in a comforting voice that sounds like she’s telling this story for the first time. “Fast forward two months, I end up winning the contest, thanks to the following on YouTube, and I sign up with a major label!”

(Kina Grannis singing one of her many cover songs, in this case, a version of “Iris”, originally performed by the Goo Goo Dolls).

In one fell swoop, Grannis has everything she ever wanted. She’s living the dream. Except she isn’t. “I realized that the family I had was the internet,” she says. “The label (Universal) wanted me to be a certain artist, and write with certain people, and scrap the album that I already did. They were thinking I’m like a female Jack Johnson.”

Grannis decided to leave the label and see how far social media would take her. As it turns out, pretty far. She now has hundreds of millions of views on YouTube and well over 1.5 million subscribers. One stop-start animated video, called “In Your Arms”, which took two years to make and uses nearly 300,000 jelly beans, has over 14 million views. “It’s a path that’s constantly changing,” she says about forging a career via the internet. “On top of that, when you’re on a label, you get to be the artist. When you’re on your own, you’re the businessman and the artist.”

But being a social media star also comes with its pitfalls. Grannis’s videos, once shot on the fly, are now professional ventures. Then, there’s the regular internal struggle about what to share with an audience who demands new updates, or you’re yesterday’s history. “I’m partly a slave to it,” says Grannis about her constant need to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. “And I’m partly in love with it. I’m one of two extremes. Sometimes I’m in a healthy place and won’t do it, and then I’ll overcompensate, and my husband is like ‘Why don’t you talk to me for a second?’”

(One of Kina Grannis’s most popular videos is “In Your Arms”, which features 300,000 jelly beans and took nearly two years to make).

The husband is Jesse Epstein, who plays under the pseudonym Imaginary Man and opens the show for Grannis when they are on tour. After knowing each other since high school, even the news that they got married caused a storm of Tweets among fans. Grannis, naturally, unveiled the news via a video for the song “My Dear”, which featured wedding footage captured on the big day. “It was one of those things where I thought people don’t need to know every part of my life,” Grannis chuckles about the secrecy in her public world. “It was a little bit out of nowhere.”

Epstein and the rest of her band will be touring with Grannis for the first time when she returns to Asia this month. Grannis last played Hong Kong in 2011, but promises a bigger show now that she’s part of a quartet. It may come as no surprise that the tour dates were even selected via a public survey the singer conducted with fans via her site. “I finished my tour everywhere else and thought I had to get to Southeast Asia,” she says. “The survey started a conversation and luckily, promoters saw it happening. I’m really excited.”

The full band will allow Grannis fans to hear more of the full-sounding pop on singles like “Fire” that featured on her fifth album “Elements”. In turn, Grannis gets to explore the Asian side of her roots a bit more (her mother is Japanese). “Being Japanese-American is part of my identity, which makes playing in Japan particularly special,” she says. “When I’m there I feel connected in some way.”

Grannis, who claims not to have struggled with issues of mixed race growing up, does recognize that her YouTube status has resonated with fans from a similar background. “First and foremost, you want to share your music,” she says. “But one thing that is amazing about YouTube and being Asian in general, is that I have never had such a connection to the Asian community and the internet has really connected me to that. It’s a group of people that I wouldn’t otherwise be connected to.”

(Grannis’s cover of “Can’t Help Falling In Love”, featured in the film “Crazy Rich Asians”, enabled the singer to gain her biggest global exposure).

POST SCRIPT: Kina Grannis and I talked about many things that didn’t fit in the article above. She said her favorite city to tour in was Amsterdam, that some of her favorite lyrics are by Bon Iver, and that she would likely be a coach or nutritionist if she weren’t singing. She would love to take her family to Japan and described herself as “awkward but I mean well.” Grannis was also oh-so-excited for her Asian tour.

She and her bandmates got as far as Jakarta, Indonesia, where they performed the first of what were supposed to be six Asian tour dates. And this is where things got really weird…

As she and her bandmates were walking off stage after the show, “a group of immigration officials walk onto the stage and confiscate our passports,” Grannis said. “They send us back to our hotel, no explanation given….I learn that our tour promoters failed to get us work visas, and that as a result of playing our concert we have committed visa fraud — a crime, they inform me, that is punishable by a $35,000 fine per person and five years in prison.” Grannis, her band, and crew ended up spending 100 days in their Jakarta hotel rooms while they were forced to go to a court trial, and were eventually found guilty. Grannis wrote about the entire ordeal in a Tumblr post:

https://www.tumblr.com/kinagrannis/145697228252/100-days-in-jakarta?redirect_to=%2Fkinagrannis%2F145697228252%2F100-days-in-jakarta&source=blog_view_login_wall

(Grannis’s 100-day ordeal inspired her to write the poignant single “California”).

Once she recovered from the intense experience, Grannis released more albums and gained worldwide exposure for appearing in the hit film “Crazy Rich Asians”. She also had a daughter with her husband Jesse.

Over the last couple of years, she has also tried to raise public awareness about her mother’s rare bone marrow cancer which requires a blood stem cell transplant to save her life. “We have searched the global registry of over 40 million people, and as of right now, she has no matches," wrote Grannis on Instagram. "With your help, we hope to change this."

And a few months ago, Grannis and her new band “people i like” released their debut album…

(New single “Northern Lights” from the debut album by people I like, featuring Kina Grannis).