LANE LINES

All photos by Rachel Bennett.

MANDI (on the origins of Lane Lines)
Every New Year's I treat as resolution time.
I always set a big goal for the year
and my big goal for 2020 was
I'm gonna write and record an album.
I'm just gonna do it.
I've been in projects for a long time as just a backup singer,
I wanna do my own thing
And then, you know,
three months later…

I met Mandi Kimes at a distance. One Sunday I was at work, regretting having that fourth drink the night before, and I saw someone new was working the record store across the way. In a brown beanie and a cardigan she looked severely comfortable, and I knew I wanted to talk to her because record store employees are some of the few people I know I can innately relate to. (I didn’t realize then that I had already met her before, albeit at a much greater distance. She was the person on the cover of Cancelled Plans, the bottom of her face obscured by the long neck of her sweater like a mouse halfway in its hole.)

A year later, as she and I sit in an empty conference room - in silence aside from the buzzing of the AC and the occasional sips of our coffees - I’m interviewing her as the frontwoman of Lane Lines. She’s also wearing a sweater, but this time we’re discussing her follow-up record.

As before, Lucid Dreaming conjures mini worlds out of its arrangements, but from the get-go it hits immediately harder, stacking up even more ambitious vocal harmonies and layering lush synths with impressive instrumental work. It could be a heavy dose of Ambien, but more likely Lucid Dreaming is the product of hard work and refinement, qualities oozing out of each of the record’s three singles.

There’s “Time and Space,” with its pounding hi-hat hits and strangely addictive vocal hook, while “Big Picture” crosses a sinister, minor-key shudder with a disco beat and a caducean chorus. “Like To Look Sad” might be the most impressive of the bunch; its shimmering Ferris wheel of a synth line plays in tandem with lushly-layered vocals akin to a classic Imogen Heap track.

MANDI
She came to the Moore Theater
back in 2018
and finally seeing her live and
seeing how she does all of her
vocal effects
with these magic gloves that she owns
I was like
How do I be that?
I wanna be that!

Kimes’ project may be synth-forward, but she started musically in more traditional settings. Raised in Phoenix with a musical father, she learned to love music first as a juvenile Disney parrot, then as a backing member of the worship choir, and then as a serious choir kid in high school. Over two summers she attended jazz camp and learned vocal improvisation, and as a choir student she got the opportunity to sing at Carnegie Hall.

Yet while her childhood was grounded mainly in jazz and classical stylings, her most significant source of musical education would come from outside the choir room or the campgrounds. In high school, she met Austin Harshman, a budding musician who happened to sit next to her in class.

MANDI
He was that kid that would walk into class
just kind of throw his iPod at me and say
Listen to what I worked on last night.
It was always exciting.
I was so stuck in my choral world
and he would show me his iPod
and it'd be Anthony Green
or the sounds of animals fighting.

With Harshman’s help, Kimes permeated her jazz/classical bubble and discovered the comparatively outre acts that would influence Lane Lines, not the least of which includes the golden harmonies of Fleet Foxes and the indie-electronic hop of Frou Frou. Harshman also started taking Kimes to local shows, and when the two attended college, they started collaborating musically as an acoustic duo under the name Painted Faces. After graduation, Kimes made the move to Seattle, but she never stopped interacting with Harshman - whenever she visited town, they would get together and share what they’d been working on.

Lane Lines would start for real during one such trip, on Thanksgiving 2019. Harshman had recently been listening to a lot of Animal Collective, and when Kimes visited, she brought along the first verse to a song she’d been working on called “Sweater.” Having recently acquired a new vocal processor, Harshman invited her to try it out, and she responded with an improvised jazz scat filtered through an auto-harmonized “barbershop” patch. Kimes thought nothing much of it at the time.

MANDI
Three weeks later
I got an email from him that said
Hey, I worked on your “Sweater” song.
He had chopped up the scatting I did
to be that sample, that da da da
and placed my vocals over it
and I thought
Well
now we have a hit.
We gotta do this for real.

Cancelled Plans was one of the hundreds of records I came across in 2020 when I had nothing better to do than surf the pages of Bandcamp while trying not to hyperventilate. If you haven’t listened yet, it’s one of those epitomic bedroom pop records; even if it weren’t released during a global pandemic it would still feel like a product of quarantine. Its songs braid shuffling drum programming with layers of vocals, humble little dioramas so insular they’re almost agoraphobic. “Sweater” is an obvious highlight from the bunch; its vocals are entirely built from synthetic harmonies, and they espouse lyrics about seeking compensatory comfort in the material world, in place of whatever (or whoever) might be missing.

The ramshackle production of Cancelled Plans is part of the charm, but Lucid Dreaming’s new sheen is something else altogether. Lucid Dreaming is a capital-A album, one that’s meant to be played front-to-back. I suspected the Kimes would be a fan of the album format given her jobs, and listening to the record confirmed my suspicions. Its opening song introduces melodies and phrases that are repeated successively later on, its tracklist is thoughtfully organized, and its contiguous moments - like the lead-in to “Daze” from “Time and Space” - feel well executed.

Its parts were recorded piecemeal; working through Dropbox, she recorded a capella vocals into Logic and bounced them to her collaborators, who would respond with instrumental parts that supported their melodic contours. The result is a record that feels more spacious, a little easy to breathe in, and yet with parts that carry that same eerie sense of displacement from each other. At the center is Kimes, still writing songs about recoiling from what’s missing.

if you're not your own biggest fan, how can you expect others to be?

-Mandi Kimes

Given the origins of its ingredients, Lucid Dreaming is still bedroom pop to the core, but with a heightened degree of ambition that’s easily discernable from its pastoral opening title track. Aside from its singles, there’s the romantic lament of “Just Friends” and the dizzying “Breakfast in Bed,” which pairs its brooking minor-key skitter with an addictive three-part vocal harmony hook. “Sparkling Cider” starts fuzzily and then transforms into a high-tempo anthem for the sober folk among us; its lyrics were inspired by a four-week songwriting class led by Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold.

MANDI
One of the takeaways from that week
was to try to find a very common phrase
and find a different way to say that phrase.
So I wanted to write a song
essentially talking about sobriety
without using the word “sober”
or “sobriety.”
There are all these songs about going out
partying, drinking, getting lit
and I don't subscribe to that culture.
I want there to be a song about
what it feels like to not participate
in the drinking lifestyle.
I didn't realize that
I needed to write this.

Kimes takes her music seriously. That’s most evident in the effort she takes to market herself, a job that’s more necessary than ever today but that many people feel too scared, or too pressured by humility, to undertake. Drag queen Trixie Mattel, one of Kimes’ musical heroes, is a model; her ability to hustle throughout multiple formats colors how Kines sees herself as not only an artist but as a cheerleader for that art. I witnessed it firsthand the moment we met when she mentioned her music to me, and continued to mention it every time we saw each other at work, until I was intrigued enough to check it out myself. It’s an admirable quality to me, and I’m envious of it.

MANDI
I wear my merch.
I tote my tote bag out in public.
It may be cringy
but I'm my biggest fan
and I'm gonna give a shit about me
so I can hopefully encourage you
to give a shit about me as well.

Indeed, relentless self-promotion has worked well in her favor. She’s been playing shows non-stop since pandemic restrictions lifted, and it eventually brought her to the Barboza stage for this year’s Capitol Hill Block Party, where the Seattle lineup for Lane Lines played for over a hundred new sets of ears. At the end of the month, she’ll be bringing that experience to the stage of the Sunset for an album release show supported by JUL!ET and Fine Arts.

On that stage, she’ll be lucid dreaming along with us all.