Kubla's Beautiful Game

I’m in the sort of basement venue that you’d expect to see in the first act of an artist’s biopic—not dingy per se, but still sopping with the frenetic energy of an audience that knows they’re early to a star. The first half of the set ends, and I head over to the stage to see Kiaran.

I tell Jane, the friend I’m with, that I don’t think I’ve ever waited in a line of fans to say hi to a friend. She, never one to leave things unsaid, tells me to have some self respect and drags me away to wait for him off to the side. Good friends protect your ego? He eventually comes by, we hug and chitchat for a second, and then he’s back off into the throngs of fans.

I pinch myself to remember that we are indeed friends. I hope everyone gets a chance to see their friends on a stage—the purest version of themselves appearing when the spotlights turn on, their ambition elevating your own, and the pure joy of seeing them play the game that they love.

It’s a classic Fake Spring in Toronto, and Kiaran and I are goldilocks’ing our way through a few restaurants on Bloor Street—the vibes are off in this one, the crowd’s too loud in this one. The street’s buzzing nervously as everyone scuttles out to enjoy some sunshine before we jynx ourselves back into Winter. We chitchat until we find our ‘just right’ at my neighbourhood Pho spot, and I find that I’m being weirdly precious about bringing him here; we’re seated at the same corner spot that I sit at on my own almost every Sunday night, phone off, hood on, just stepping away from the world for a bit. I joke about it to him, but he doesn’t laugh. Just nods in sagely acceptance.

I’ve never written a profile. I’ve never, now that I think about, really even interviewed anyone. And so although conversations flow easy with Kiaran, often diving straight into the deep end, I tell myself that the Good and Right way to do this is to warm up the dialogue before I ask him about his traumas or whatever. We start off by joking about how the word “fallacious” could just as easily be an adjective for “having the qualities of fellatio”. Kiaran asks what the word “analogous” implies, then. Suffice to say, there was no warmup.

Kubla’s latest album, “Close to the Sun”

“Am I falling down, or am I flying?” - Kubla, Running Loose

The story of Kubla begins with his parents. Kiaran’s parents are both musicians, which he says is a rarity. “Most of their musician friends found partners who were more music-adjacent than actual musicians themselves, managers and industry folk and the like”. I can tell he’s trying to hide a smirk when he admits that his parents’ friends refer to him as a bit of thoroughbred horse. And, honestly, when he’s in his muscle tank warming up before a set, you might not be able to tell the difference. But, presumably much like an actual thoroughbred horse, Kiaran grew up blissfully unaware of his inevitable career. “It was a foregone conclusion to everyone else, but it just kind of happened for me.”

His parents each served as a different model for his career—his mother a prolific creative but not seeing much in the way of commercial success, his father seeing some commercial success but never reaching his full potential. He freely admits the head start he was able to get because of his being born into this world, whether connections to industry folks in Toronto when he left his band in Victoria, or just the benefit of having learned from his parents mistakes. “It feels like I was always the heir to this broken kingdom", he says. But if it sounds like Kiaran is being self aggrandizing with early album titles like “The Golden Boy”, he’s not. He has this incredible ability to be deeply aware of this hero’s journey that he’s on, and yet totally deny any of his own agency in making it come true. When friends reach out to congratulate him on how well his music is doing he’ll just laugh and say, “yeah but it was always meant to be this way”. He doesn’t feel ownership over the success and doesn’t feel his own will at play in pursuing the career; he admits he’s in the fortuitous position of being able to take none of the credit or all of the credit, depending on how it might serve him.

“I ain’t what I am, I’m just what I do” - Kubla, Poppyseed

As I’m battering Kiaran with questions over his cold, uneaten bowl of Pho, it strikes me that he’s using the word “game” over and over again. It really does feel like this is all play for him. Not just the music—life. He’d like to buy his mom a house one day, but his music isn’t just a means to an end. His singular goal is to instill presence in people, and you can feel it as soon as you’re in his gravity distortion field. The slow, low, cadence with which he speaks; how he’ll ignore all attempts to shake his hand so that he can go straight for a big hug; the way he’ll splay his palms out towards you slowly when he’s explaining something as though he’s intentionally infecting you with his singular ability to live in the moment.

After an hour of questions, in an attempt to make the conversation less one-sided—or at the very least give the guy a chance to eat—I bring up his use of the word “game” and launch into a monologue about Patrick Rothfuss’s “Wise Man’s Fear”. It’s a well known Fantasy novel, but not one that I can commonly reference just because of the relative obscurity of the genre. The entire story is told as a memory, where a chaotic musical prodigy named Kvothe, son to two musicians, recounts his childhood in his old age. In the scene that I specifically wanted to reference, the prodigy spends an extended period of time with the equivalent of a chess master only to find himself losing over and over and over again. It’s his first time experiencing incompetence—him the master musician, the quick learner of magic, the center of the world. Kiaran’s nodding along enthusiastically as I’m telling this story, and I’m realizing in real-time that I very well could be blowing his cover as a real-life Kvothe—until he cuts me off, recounting “…and then he learns that the losing doesn’t matter, because it’s all just about the pursuit of a beautiful game”.

It’s illustrative of his state of play that we don’t really talk about the music itself. Kiaran likens it to something like magic: he’s just vibrating air in your general direction until it makes you feel something. I laugh at the analogy, but I feel a knot in my stomach that I can’t totally explain in the moment. It’s thrilling to see him play his game: totally lost in the moment during a guitar solo, bantering with the audience during a set, cackling when he gets flashed by a fan. The degree to which this is all a game to him is almost jealousy-inducing. How many people can profess to living in such perfect alignment with their, dare I say it, destiny? He jokes that he was born into this, or that it was always meant to be this way, but he’s too close to it to see his own agency in this story that he has a singular ability to write. It’s incredible what he’s doing. I reflect on my own agency: what is it that’s misaligned in my own life? What is it that could be a lifelong game for me? What is it that I find so fun that I could hinge my entire livelihood on, and then in the next breath brush away as nothing more than magic? Sometimes, journaling before I sleep, I have this intrusive realization that I’ve done this before. That meeting, that problem I’m berating myself for, that party, that date. All of it—it’s happened before. It’s the loop of safety; when the similar games of your childhood—business school, internships, safety—lead to the similar games of your adulthood—tech jobs, marriage, safety—lead to endgames that all just sound embarrassingly derivative. It’s counterintuitive, but it feels like his abstractions of games and play and stories actually make the whole question of life simple: am I having fun every day? But I don’t think the beauty of a game is found in its novelty, either. Novelty for its own sake is short sighted. But the essence of play is that anything can feel novel. Routine is a function of every life—I’m not glamourizing the life of a budding musician as one without its rote moments—but his ability to find the play in it all is what makes his perspective so infectious. He may have spawned on Go against his will, but he’ll sure as hell make a beautiful game of it.

“She sees me as Plato, with a pretty face” - Kubla, Icarus

I originally met Kiaran through a bunch of—excuse me—synchronicities. I was at an open mic type night last summer, and when the opening act took the stage, my music savant of a friend Danny whispers to me, “watch out for this guy, he’ll be the next big name out of Toronto”. The musician was incredible, but we had a long set ahead of us, I forgot his name, and I thought nothing of it. About 6 months later, I started hosting a Salon dinner series where interesting strangers could get together to talk about interesting things. A friend that I had met at a previous salon said that she would be bringing someone along, but at the last minute, my friend bailed. Her plus one miraculously still said yes to a dinner with strangers, told me that he was a musician, and that was mostly the end of that conversation. As the night went on, it was clear he was one of the most interesting people at the table: an insane breadth of thought, unafraid to challenge strangers on their opinions but always doing it with warmth, and oozing with a quiet confidence. Afterwards, he was one of the last ones to stick around to hang out, and so I finally asked him about his music. “It’s nice. You should listen to it.” We did, I realized that he was the musician that I had heard all those months ago, and the rest is history.

Fast forward to today. The bulk of this piece was written in April, when I had initially told Kiaran that I wanted to write profiles this year. Just this past week, he held the biggest show of his life so far, with 300 raving fans at Longboat Hall to kick off Canadian Music Week. The show itself was unsurprisingly moving, but it was my interactions with other audience members that really left me thinking. Everywhere I looked, there were—again—synchronicities happening. A close friend’s girlfriend grabbed my shoulder from behind; “You know Kiaran too?!”. Friends that I had brought along were bumping into friends who they’d had no idea would be there. I was recognizing strangers in the crowd who I had only ever seen before in the background of Instagram stories. These stories sound innocent enough, but it’s eerily funny how consistently the word “coincidence” comes up when people describe how they met Kiaran. But there are no coincidences when you’re the main character of your own game.

And as for the music itself? It, indeed, is nice. You should listen to it.

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Gaddddammm this was a tricky one to write. Switching perspectives, switching tenses, doing the story justice but giving myself room to reflect. But I’d love to do more of these. Who should I meet next?

Huge thank you to Jacob for pushing me on this, Ajay for always editing/challenging me, and Kiaran for being the guinea pig. Share and subscribe meri jaans.