King Princess on Drag, Drugs, Parasocialism, and Leaving the Major-Label System

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

King Princess' third album Girl Violence is out this Friday, and I do think it's their best album to date. It also represents a new era for the artist born Mikaela Straus, as they've made the move from a major label to an indie—specifically, section1—which was also detailed a little in a recent New Yorker profile. I was highly interested in talking to Mikaela about a broad variety of subjects, and the result is honestly one of the most entertaining and wide-ranging interviews I've published on the newsletter this year. It's a real enjoyable read, check it out:

Hi Michaela—how's it going today?
I just hit the morning blunt, so I'm feeling pretty good.

Where are you at right now?
I'm in Brooklyn—born and raised in Williamsburg.

Word. I lived in Williamsburg from 2011 to 2021 before moving to Bushwick.
I was there. I was a little kid walking around in 2011. We definitely passed each other on the street.

I don't doubt it. As somebody who's been in Williamsburg for your entire life, what are your takeaways about how the area's changed?
It's funny, because my dad moved here in the early '80s but my mom moved in '89. I was talking about this to my stylist Gabe the other day—he grew up in Williamsburg too. As much as it has changed, my local pharmacy—Northside Pharmacy—Rachel and Lena are the two women who run it, and they've been my pharmacists since I was born. So although things have changed, there's these brick-and-mortar community members that I still interact with and are still a part of my life. My neighbor Paula is in her 90s—she's lived in the building in front of me my entire life, and I go up there and visit her and we drink rum. There's rent- stabilized housing across the street from me, and my aunt Carol lives there, who I grew up with.

I still have my staples—I just also have an Apple Store and a Sephora. Even though that's disturbing, and Friday through Sunday is tourist hell, as you know, I still have these little gems that I've had since I was a little kid. I feel really grateful—but that's very New York: The persistence of certain people to be like, "You know what? We're still here."

This is ridiculous, but my cat is doing this thing now where, when she's on our bed, she starts meowing at me to be taken off the bed right when I start a call. So I have to take her off the bed right now.
I understand. I have a dog, and it's the same shit. She develops these bizarre, quirky little things that make my life hell.

Do you find that your dog's routines change over time?
Well, my dog is like a cat, truly. Her most recent thing is that she doesn't like eating her breakfast with her bowl on the mat that I've purchased for her. She likes to take her breakfast sitting on the couch. I have to bring it to her, and I also have to smush it up a certain way. That is deeply frustrating and upsetting.

I think this new record is honestly your best record to date. Walk me through what went into this one.
When I first started playing it for my friends, they were like, "Michaela, you sound free." I think that's indicative of the place in which I wrote it—in New York, in one studio, with the same guys, making a record the way I the records I love were made, where you're really experimenting with the gear and what's at your fingertips, using the room around you.

My last couple records were a little bit more sporadic. I went to different studios, wrote here, wrote there, reassembled them with Mike and Nick. But at the end of the day, you're gonna get something that sounds a little bit more disheveled if you're in multiple different places. So for this album, the writing of it was really about smoking weed and being like, "I'm going to say exactly what I want to say." No holds barred, no limitations. I'm going to trust my gut on all my instincts with these songs and see where that takes me, instead of overthinking what a label would think or what xyz person on my team is gonna say.

Aside from a couple of songs that actually started off in L.A. with some other core collaborators, 95% of the songs I wrote were collaborations between me, [Jacob Portrait], and [Joseph Pincus]—but, lyrically, I was pretty much at the helm. Trusting yourself as a lyricist is really hard to do—especially after you've done a bunch of records, because you start to overthink. For me, I started to overthink my writing because of what worked or didn't work previously. Being able to shed that was like exposure therapy. "You're going to sit down and write this fucking song exactly how you want to write it, and you're going to force yourself to be honest and not think of the outside world as you do this"—which is how I wrote "1950" and "Talia," just me at a piano being a sad lesbian, which is what I am, so I might as well do that.

I'd say that this record is the most like my first EP—and maybe a bit of Cheap Queen—than anything i've done. Production-wise, it's referencing my own catalog a bit, as well as ideas that I maybe started off on and didn't fully see through on Cheap Queen and Make My Bed. As a 26-year-old now, I'm like, "I was on to something there—let me bring that back."

Tell me more about working with Jacob. He's become something of a secret weapon on others' records.
He's definitely the rock and roll Larry David, which is a fantastic perspective to have in the studio. Jake's a lovable curmudgeon, while I was freshly being born as a chicken again after being in self-imposed creative purgatory for a while—and then Joe is so stoked and excited and very much a young dude who just had his first smashes with SZA and is really excited and not jaded at all by the industry. The three of us together was the perfect sauce. You had a bit of the angry "We hate everybody," a bit of the excited, and then me being just sad and gay—a very delicious sauce.

It's always fun for me when a collaboration feels like two people bringing two very different perspectives. Jake and I butt heads and in a way that's really healthy and kind of rare for me. Because I grew up in a studio and am a multi-instrumentalist and producer, it's easy for me to be assigned as the leader. That's healthy, to an extent, but you need people who are going to be like, "I actually think this should be like this" and really fight for their opinions—and that was what it was like working with Jake.

Also, sonically, a lot of our reference points were really similar. He was really enamored by the way I do background vocals, which was something I'd never heard a collaborator comment on. It was really nice being like, "Oh, so you recognize that I take a lot from Motown, and the '60s and '70s, and Crosby Stills"—the ultimate harmonizers. He saw that so early on, which made me feel very seen and validated. He could pinpoint things that I'd done in my production previously that he felt really worked, and that felt like coming home.

I just love working with him, and I love when we clash and battle it out on ideas. He's a really good man, and a really talented musician and producer. I also just love his playing style. He's somebody who's happy to hand over the instrument if I feel like someone can do the part better. There was a couple times on this record where he elevated the call with his musicianship in a way that I'm really proud of.

You left Columbia to be on an indie for this record. The music industry moves so fast at this point, and you've grown up adjacent to it for your entire life. Talk to me about the changes you've witnessed with the business side of things.
One of my friends, who's a very successful songwriter, said something to me the other day that summarized the biggest change in the music industry in the last seven or eight years, which is that there's no more gatekeeping. Major labels used to be able to be like, "This is the thing we are we are pushing, and it's going to be number one." That was the power of the major label—the ability to pull strings to use radio to dump money into certain aspects of an artist's career in order to bolster the whole thing. They just don't have that pull anymore.

Artists in my generation were told while coming up in the industry that, if you sign to an indie, you're going to have no money and no support—that the major label system is where it's at, and that's the marker of success. I think that's a lie, and it's become progressively more not true over time. I got to an indie label and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of people working on my team—the generosity of budget and the amount of grassroots work that actually does propel a career, versus what used to be an easy fix for major labels, which was, "Call the radios and be like, 'We're doing this now.'"

The indies are actually getting smart to the landscape, which is a fan-based landscape. It's all about the fans—making the kids excited and doing things that service the fans. Because the indies are used to that kind of guerrilla marketing, they're thriving in this setting, because there's a difference between doing the record signings and the fucking activations that feel really like community building and making sure that there's underplay shows and these things that you get told aren't going to move the needle in the major label system. The indies have just been on it for longer—and, plus, they do have money. A lot of them are independently wealthy, you know?

Learn from my experiences, artists: I had a fantastic experience in the major label system, in that I learned what glitters isn't always gold. I also learned that there's still incredible work to be done at those majors. But the majors have to get smart to the landscape. It's a fan's landscape now. If you're not spending every day servicing your fan base, you're doing something wrong. But I learned so much from being there. I don't think I would be where I'm at if I hadn't had that experience—and I don't think that I would've come to being at an indie if not having had that experience.

I do think the fan-driven landscape is a positive—but, unfortunately for artists, it's just so incredibly oversaturated now that breaking through is hard. It's a crapshoot, and it's arbitrary. But at the same time, I'm happy to live in a world where young queer people decide what's cool. They always have, so now it's just about getting hip to the fact that we've always been the people who move the dial.

Talking more about meeting the fans where they're at, so to speak—you host the monthly Bazongas party in Brooklyn. Talk to me about how that fits in with community-building for you.
I grew up with a lot of homos who were very present and active in the '80s and '90s New York club scene, and I grew up hearing stories about divas showing up in outfits that they spent all week making. There was a sense of pride about craftiness and putting your whole pussy into silliness—going out and having the party itself be the celebration of the work you did for the party. That was always interesting to me, and I also felt that there was a deficit of that in the lesbian community. The queer male community is really familiar with the idea of dress-up and that type of silliness, but with the lesbians, I was going out to a lot of parties that felt like dick measuring competitions. And by the way—I enjoy those parties, too.

But part of me was like, "What if there was a party for dykes and queers of all sorts that leaned entirely on dress-up?" Because dress-up, fundamentally, is one of our great tools. That's something we have used as armor for hundreds and thousands of years. So that was the mission statement, and what came of it—and what I'm so proud of—is this really kind, fun, silly party that does feel like community building.

Being the people's princess means being amongst the people, and I am amongst the people. That's always been the person I am. I don't feel that the stage exists unless I'm on it—even just the elevation of being above people on a stage. I thrive in a setting where we're all in the same playing field. Because I know what those kids mean to me, and what I mean to them, and Bazongas felt like the culmination of that. Let's all be silly, and I'll be running around dressed as Lord Voldemort. It's brought me so much fucking joy.

I love to dress up. It's such an integral part of my confidence. I've also loved to see everybody's outfits, and the thought and effort and work that has been put into these costumes, and people's faces light up as they see each other. Everyone's gabbing about the costumes, and it's an icebreaker for a really nice environment where people can dance, get drunk, and see performances and listen to DJs. That's the goal, and that's what my shows feel like, so I figured this was a natural evolution as well as giving back to my city.

Do you remember the first time you ever went out to a queer party?
I definitely frequented the Metropolitan as a teenager—shout out to the lovely doorwoman to snapped my fake ID in half, she's still there. I definitely went to PAT as a teenager. But to be quite honest with you, I wasn't really involved in a lesbian scene when I was growing up, and that was a huge hurdle for me, as an adult, coming back to the city and figuring out where I fit in all of this—because I do make music for the lesbians. I lived in L.A. for seven years, and there's no fucking lesbian scene, and then I moved back here and I was a stranger to it, you know?

A big part of throwing the party was figuring out where I fit in this, because I'm coming in as somebody who's pretty moderately known in this community, but also really unfamiliar with it. How do I become a part of a community that I am inherently a part of without feeling like a stranger? I've also met an incredible group of friends—women, dykes, trans guys, people who have taken me in and become family—and I don't think I would've found those people if I had not been on a mission to find them. I feel really lucky, as a kid who didn't have a lot of lesbian and queer female friends, and I feel truly healed. As a kid, I was mostly around gay guys and straight women.

I'd love to hear you talk more about dressing up through the lens of gender.
The mission statement of Cheap Queen was that, after "1950" came out, I was thrown into something that I felt like I was ready for—and I absolutely wasn't. My 19-year-old response to that was like, "I'm going to get in drag." I need to get in drag." I'm questioning, looking at, and dissecting parts of my gender that I wouldn't have if I hadn't been put into the spotlight. All of a sudden, these questions were coming up about my body and how to maneuver being in the middle. Being somebody who's non-binary, where day-to-day it changes and I'm this gender mess, drag is a home. It's playful femininity, and I'd always felt like an observer to femininity and less of a participant—and this allowed me to be a participant.

I spent most of that first record cycle in drag. Even now—I went to a photo shoot the other day, and they had a wig table and they were like, "You're back in drag," and I was like, "Thank God." It is really a tool that I go back to, and Bazongas has been a part of this. It felt like a no-brainer in the moment to be like, "If I'm feeling weird about the fact that I'm not a woman, but I'm not a man, let me go to the extreme of that and create these characters Cindy Sherman-style, you know? That's what I did, and looking back, I'm really proud of that decision because it's still something that is integral to my personhood. I'm a part-time drag queen. I'm a part-time butch. I'm a lot of different things, and drag is like a tool in the tool belt.

Going back to talking about fandom—I feel like a lot of pop artists have their work cut out for them when it comes to parasocialism, but it does seem especially true for like queer-identifying pop artists. They're probably dealing with parasocialism in a way that, say, Benson Boone is not. I'm really curious to hear you talk about that aspect of being a pop artist. Are there any moments where you feel like you'd like to pull away?
I don't personally feel that way anymore, but I did very much so in the beginning. I was extremely young, and it was a different time—it's weird to say that, but it was. There weren't a lot of lesbian-forward pop acts out, so the sexualization came from a place of genuine excitement from the fans—but the sexualization when I was 19 or 20 was intense, and I would get grabbed and touched. There was this inappropriateness that came from a good place, I think—from a place of there being a deficit and people wanting something that they've never had, which I totally understand. But as a result, I felt really off-put and scared a lot of the time, and I communicated that by being standoffish.

Now, at 26, I'm not that person. When I go outside—when I go to an event where I'm going to be recognized—I know I'm going to be recognized. For me, this is what I want in my life. I want to be a pop star—a rock star, a queer icon. That's who I am! Fucking come up to me and talk to me. I'm on this tip where, there's been such an influx of artists being like, "Respect my space," and going at their fans—and that's just not who I am. Come up to me and talk to me if you want to. Tell me what you think of the record. I feel appreciative of it, to be honest with you.

As far as the type of parasocialism where people neg you on the internet or say shitty stuff, I'm also at a place in my life where I've been canceled so many times that I'm like, "If you don't like me, great." Say what you want. There hasn't been anything said that hasn't already been said. I'm like Eminem at the end of 8 Mile.

I actually just listened to The Marshall Mathers LP for the first time in a minute. Did you listen to Eminem when you were younger?
Definitely. I mean, honestly, maybe it was because he's kind of also a drag queen.
His music is whimsical and queer by nature—which is ironic, because he says "faggot" all the time. A lot of my references—not specifically Eminem—but my references of pop and rock stardom, dress-up and silliness, do come from men too.
The lessons of the queer community are so ever-present in music that they're present in the straight music and the gay music. They were unavoidable because we're so next-level.

There was a quote in the New Yorker profile of you from Hugh Jackman saying, "I don't know if I'm supposed to call you King Princess or Michaela," which I thought was really interesting in terms of thinking about pop and persona. Talk to me about the blurred lines between King Princess and Michaela.
I think we're the same person. If anything, King Princess is just the elevated version of me, in the same way that finding bits of yourself that are hidden. King Princess, to me, is just a summation of my best parts and my worst parts. The diva-ness, the kindness, the showmanship, the vulnerability—King Princess is that for me, and it's become even more blurred as I've gotten older. The more that I perform and make music, the more I find myself, and in doing so, King Princess feels even more apt—the name, the idea behind the fact that we're all King Princesses. We all have that elevated part of ourselves that wants to sing, dance, make people laugh, and be beautiful and ugly at the same time. That feels more and more true as I get older.

But I do know that there's a lot of people that feel the opposite—who feel like they get off the stage or get done with their meet-and-greet and are like, "No, I'm not that anymore." I totally understand and have so much empathy for that, but personally, music is my place of truth. King Princess is my place of truth. It's my home, and I'm lucky to grow more into that. Also, it's interchangeable. My friends call me Mich or KP. I respond to KP as much as I respond to Michaela. I'm lucky that I feel this way, though, because it sounds really uncomfortable and painful to feel like you have to put it down.

The same profile also gestured towards you dealing with a breakup and substance abuse. Tell me about how those aspects of your personal life played a role over the last couple of years.
Yeah, I mean, I was like a pretty cray-cray drug addict. I don't know, you're 17, 18, 19 years old, and all of a sudden there's money in your account and access to sex and drugs. I fell into the the age-old trap, which is almost like a rite of passage. I had the access, so I fucking did all the drugs.

I come from an AA background. My family, everyone is an addict. I always knew in the back of my mind that this was where my brain was wired for this. I can pinpoint a couple moments in which I feel like I really fucked up and was out of control—and, honestly, it needed to stop. I love my job, I love my career. There's so much fun that goes into this career—and I haven't eliminated all the fun, I just eliminated the drugs, because it just wasn't fucking helping anything. It wasn't helping my songwriting, my friendships, my interpersonal relationships.

It's something I continue to struggle with and think about, and analyze, and go to therapy about—because I did affect my brain by doing a lot of drugs really young.
My pleasure centers—my dopamine and serotonin—are definitely affected by the amount of drugs I did. That's funny, but I'm also grateful that happened, because I like the person I am now, and a big part of that is not being a fucking asshole cokehead and having seen the dark side. I never want to feel that way again, ever.

I still drink—I've just gotten rid of the powders. Now, when I see people who are like cooked out of their mind, I'm like, "I feel you, girl." When you see that jaw going and they're like, We're going to be best friends," like Julianne Moore and Heather Graham in Boogie Nights—I fucking feel that viscerally. Never again. But it's important to talk about, because it's so easy to like look at young people who are out of control and not actually see how easy it is, in the music industry, to become an insane drug addict. The access is incredible, and empathy is a really strong tool in terms of seeing that and confronting it. It's a tool that a lot of people are still getting the hang of using, so to speak, when they witness people who are at least struggling on a basic level.

A sense of understanding always helps in those cases, and thank God I had people like [Fiona Apple] and Florence Welch—people whotook a liking to me, who had been through it, and were a little bit older and could see that in me and give me that empathy. Ii was really lucky to have people in my arsenal, and in my life, who saw where I was at and, instead of judging, showed empathy. I really lucked out. I have a couple of North stars in this industry that I love very dearly and have been incredibly good to me.

You were a guest judge on Is It Cake?.
Correct.

Let's talk about what you're consuming when it comes to TV and movies.
I am deeply consuming Love is Blind UK. These people are so sick in the head. It's actually so fucking crazy. I like when reality shows play with people's lives.

I do, too.
Like, we're talking about people's livelihoods, girl. We're talking about prenups! I'm a reality TV junkie, but I like the really fucked up shit. I watched all of Bad Girls Club.

I had a friend who was a producer on Bad Girls Club, and she said to me while working on it, "If hell exists, I am going there."
And I'll see her fucking there. I was a huge Survivor head for a very long time. I'm a huge Housewives fan. As far as actual television and film that is of substance, I'm a huge Alien nerd, so I'm really enjoying Alien: Earth. I'm watching the Amanda Knox show. I find her case extremely interesting—the Italians being like, "She's a woman! She's crazy" and putting her in prison. "She has a vibrator, she must go to jail!"

I watch a lot of true crime. I read an article that says if you fall asleep listening to true crime, there's something deeply wrong with you—and that I really resonate with, because I fall asleep to true crime. As a media consumer, I'm really high-low. I'll go and see full arthouse stuff—I grew up going to the Angelica, I'm that bitch—but then I'm fully watching Poop Cruise or Amy Bradley Is Missing.

I watched part of the Amy Bradley doc.
That shit's crazy. She's fully alive! They have photos of her hooking.

Have you seen the Alec Baldwin show?
I watched the first couple episodes. It honestly it got so dark that I had to stop

The show kind of sold me on Hilaria. She comes across as relatively well-adjusted.
Yeah, well-adjusted for a woman pretending to be Spanish with 32 children.

You do look at Alec Baldwin's eyes, and you see that there's no light in them. This is a guy who killed somebody and is clearly tormented by it. It's so fucking crazy. Deciding to do a reality television show after all of that happened...the world we live in is full of wonder. I am constantly intrigued and interested by the mental case studies of people who put themselves on reality TV. The thought process that goes into Love Is Blind..."I haven't had really good luck dating, so I'm gonna go on a show where I get married sight unseen, after a week, to a stranger." It makes less sense than 90 Day Fiancé, because all those guys just want mail order brides.

I personally have wanted to go on Survivor. The athletic challenges, I would absolutely kill. Puzzles, I would be useless. Do not have me do any of those puzzles. The interpersonal stuff could go either way, because I'm a lover-hater type of bitch. I keep asking my team if I can apply, and they say, "No."