1 week Ago By Kate Branch
“No one told me,” says singer-songwriter Domino Kirke , her soft, ethereal voice becoming more staccato with each word. “No one prepared me. No one is talking about it.
” The New York-based musician, birth educator and mother of two—with twins on the way—is talking about the first stillbirth she experienced in her career as a doula. “It changed all my wiring,” she says of the harsh sense of injustice she felt when holding a stillborn baby for the first time. “Like birth, you never get used to it.
You realize just how close we are to death, and you can’t take anything for granted after that.” Kirke realizes this isn’t typical fodder for an interview. But Kirke, 42, is talking about the things no one wants to talk about, perhaps most poignantly on her new album, The Most Familiar Star , out April 18.
It’s a bare-all kind of record, co-written with Eliot Krimsky and produced by Chris Taylor from indie rock band Grizzly Bear, with themes ranging from miscarriage and birth to sexual abuse, parental neglect, love—the maternal kind, the romantic kind, the messy kind that exists between you and your ex. “How do we hold all these truths at once and not collapse?” She asks somewhat rhetorically, somewhat not. Growing up, life looked “good on paper ,” says Kirke, who was born in London and moved to the U.
S. when she was 12. Her parents, the English rock drummer Simon Kirke and the British fashion and interiors darling Lorraine Kirke, eventually settled Domino, her older brother, and two younger sisters, Jemima and Lola , both actresses, in New York City in the mid ‘90s.
“We had the parties and the names and the homes, you know, and the insanity and the excitement and the glitz and the glam,” she says, “but there was no parenting happening—ever.” Kirke studied classical piano and voice at La Guardia High School in Queens, and embarked on a solo career in music until she got pregnant at age 26. After giving birth to her son, Cassius, and feeling unsupported—by her family, by her artist community, by her birth team—she found herself setting aside music for body work, later becoming a doula.
In 2012, she co-founded the childbirth collective and community space Carriage House Birth . In their first five years, they grew from 10 to over 100 full-time doulas in New York and Los Angeles. In 2018, she co-founded the community space Grand Street Healing Project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“I had a crash course in intimacy,” Kirke says of her work as a teacher and doula. “I witnessed hundreds of families with their parents and in-laws and I would see so much love and care that I just couldn’t identify with. “And I was there just giving, giving, giv—,” she says, before taking a breath between tears.
“And giving. I had my son at home while I was giving to others. There was a lot of imbalance [in my life].
” Kirke began to spend more time at home with her son, writing and releasing songs about how to stay embodied, while always staying involved with birth work as a a doula mentor. The Most Familiar Star is her latest musical foray into giving back—this time, first and foremost to herself. “Mercy” is the first song on the record, and it shimmers, beginning with weeping notes of a cello over a crescendoing piano, with lyrics: “You’re still out there, I can see your face in time/ You’re still out there, but you’ve barely been mine.
” Kirke wrote the song after experiencing a second miscarriage with her husband, actor Penn Badgley , with whom she just celebrated eight years of marriage . “I was still bleeding from the D and C, and I just got on the piano, and was like, 'Who was this soul and where did they go?’” And then there is “Teething,” the album’s finale, an eerie almost taunting love song about the end of her relationship with her oldest son’s father, folk musician Morgan O’Kane —“the person who made me a mother,” she says. “Growing up, I had a lot of door slamming, physical abuse, a lot of Boomer generation, like, ’Argh!’ And [my parents] would fight and leave me by myself to think ‘Was I bad? Am I bad?’ And so ‘Teething’ is my way of saying to my son and his dad, ‘I’ll never do that to you.
’” In between you have “Stepchild,” is about blended families, as well as “Secret Growing,” which talks about the sexual abuse Kirke experienced, and quickly repressed, when she was a child. A hazy, nostalgic opening featuring a fluttering flute and an electronic organ eventually gives way to lyrics: “I was just sleeping, six years-old, family loud downstairs/ Drunk on wine / I kept one eye on the ceiling, he stole my time.” “Talking about childhood sexual abuse in a song? ‘No, thank you!’” She says of people’s immediate reaction to the subject matter.
“But we’re only harming each other by not talking about it.” On the album’s lead single, “It’s Not There,” which features friend and fellow singer Angel Olsen and is based on a sample by Sharon Van Etten , the mood is melancholy and mysterious, reminiscent of a David Lynch film. The electronics against a mini orchestra—bass, flute, sax, clarinet, percussion—evoke a full, underwater soundscape, like you’re submerged in a comforting dream, or another life.
“It’s about looking for my old self and not finding it,” says Kirke, this time to a crowd at The Owl in Brooklyn, New York. On a Thursday night in late February, friends and fans huddle around the small stage, while Badgley sits in the back holding their four year-old son, who is fast asleep. As Kirke cradles the mic in one hand and touches her growing belly with the other, her long brown hair draping over a black knit maxi dress, she closes her eyes and repeats: “Time takes time to reveal / You know you know you never heal.
” “There is a loss of self [during motherhood] but a renewal as well,” says Kirke. “That’s why people in the birth community like to call it ‘threshold work.’ Because birth is life and death.
It’s all of it.” The Most Familiar Star is out April 18..
