oh! FUNNY by Kai Bosch
About two weeks ago, I got reminded of the many encounters a tube ride can offer in the middle of the day as Kai Bosch started teasing on the Piccadilly song aka “Funny” - out now!
Bonnie, our creative brain and writer, met up with him over Zoom for a chat about the song, heartbreaks and his upcoming tour.
Bonnie Orbison: I'm so excited to have you here! I was like I'm giving it a shot - I’ll comment under your TikTok and you replied to it and I was like “Yay!”
Kai Bosch: Well, I think you caught it in the perfect point where I was still I was still really excited by all the people getting excited by it, so was just reading the comments like religiously so I think I literally saw it like as soon as it came in and I was like “Yeah, why not?” um but yeah really really chuffed to have been asked. I'm really excited by this song and people connecting with it.
Bonnie: Totally, like I didn't follow you before that and I was just like it's such a relatable situation because like we all have been in the tube and we're like “Oh hopefully you know we don’t bump into someone” and like I've run into so many people in the tube and was just like “Oh my god!” - getting that awkwardness.
Kai: I think that's what's interesting for me is like I didn't really expect it to resonate and for it to catch but at the same time obviously everyone lives their lives in these like big cities where they'll have relationships or they'll have certain modes of public transport completely tied to the trauma of a person.
We all just are going about with these like stories and kind of traumas in our heads and actually I feel like maybe it's something that isn't really spoken about because it seems a bit weird to just completely blacklist a station or like a line because of someone.
It's been really cool to see that everyone does the same thing where they are glued to the doors of the tube whenever they go past their ex's stop.
It's been really really good to see the reaction and having people resonate with it in that way.
Bonnie: Do you want to introduce yourself a bit? Do you want to talk a bit about your journey?
Kai: My name is Kai Bosch. I am a 22-year-old writer and singer and producer, originally from Scotland, which no one knows. I moved when I was quite young. I grew up in rural Cornwall, which is in the southwest of England. It’s just farms and beaches and nothing else really in a village of about 100 people like really really small and that’s where I started making music because I was this gay teenager in the middle of this really conservative and rural part of the UK. The only thing that was an escape for me really was listening to music and seeing these larger-than-life figures like Lana Del Rey or FKA twigs or Lorde, Charli XCX.
It was this world that I was just obsessed with and it was really what served me as an escape for this quite aging population rural environment. So I started just playing around.
I didn't tell anyone, even my parents, I spent all my money from the cafe job that I was working in on some basic recording equipment. And then just in the middle of the night, whenever I was by myself, I'd just record music and I fell in love with it. With how I could tell my story and my life and my perspective of things through lyrics. It's always been about the lyrics for me more than anything else and telling my story and kind of getting my point across. That's kind of how it started really for me.
When I was 17, I moved from Cornwall to Berlin - well, it's the opposite of Cornwall, really. I felt as a gay teenager, I just had so much life that I wasn't going to be able to live as long as I was in Cornwall. So I thought Berlin is the place where I can fast track my experiences. I had an amazing time and again it just continued to inform my sound, my experiences and my lyrical content. Most definitely when I was in Berlin, I think my music became a lot more upbeat and also much more with electronic elements. I really got a lot of electronic influences, a bit of dance here and there, not always, but whereas before I think it was just kind of mainly guitar and piano - quite soft.
After that I moved to London and I've lived in London now for five years. Here I completely self-taught production and singing. Just making music from my bedroom.
God, I couldn't sing when I was 17.
Like I look back and the thing that was feeding me was delusion. I'm so glad that I was that deluded as a 17-year-old to keep singing because now I actually can sing and I'm really glad because otherwise I wouldn't be able to.
I've started working with some other people here now. I bring them in to kind of help me finish and elevate things or see my work from a different perspective.
At the moment I'm obviously mid-release of my EP which is called “Love, Throw Me a Bone” which - well until “Funny” happened (a late addition to this) - was this really beautiful collection of songs documenting the nine months I spent living with my ex-boyfriend after we broke up. Just two of us sharing a bed having been broken up and all the kind of experiences; the hurt and the love + everything in between that came with watching your ex-boyfriend fall out of love with you while still - then obviously I think “Funny” is kind of like the full stop on that.
I'd say lots of feelings of back and forth - I love you, I don't love you, I want to be with you, I don't want to be with you to just put it frankly fuck you right at the end.
For most of the EP apart from “Funny” which I made with with Gabe Coulter. I also worked with a dude called Charlie Andrew who produced all of the Alt-J albums, worked with London Grammar, Wolf Alice and a bunch of bands that I love. It's been really, really brilliant working with him and kind of having his mind in on the project as well.
Bonnie: Tell the story behind “Funny”. What inspired it?
Kai: It was a really interesting one for me because the songs that I've released before and like usually write are so much more poetic and metaphorical. I really spent a lot of time on the words and trying to make everything I say like poetry and beautiful so like people will like look at it and think “Oh my goodness, that's like the most profound thing I've ever heard”.
With this song I literally just made it as a joke I went into the studio like two days after I bumped into my ex for the first time since so he dumped me on my birthday last August. He hadn’t spoken to me since, like completely ghosted me, whatever. I was always a bit like “This is really strange” cause by the end of our relationship it was quite contentious and not very nice but like we always at least spoke to each other and had a lot of love for each other so him to just like disappear I always found that weird. And it took a lot of time to figure out why that was.
Anyway so cut to a month ago, I am on the tube in which I know that I share with him the Piccadilly line, obviously.
I get on the tube and I just have this gut feeling I'm like “I'm gonna see him today”. Because for the past however many months like five months I'd been getting on that tube and thinking “Is today gonna be the day?” but like that day I knew I was gonna bump into my ex and I did. We bumped into each other at the station so I was coming out of the station and he was going in.
I was like “He didn't see me”. I saw him and I thought “I will regret if I don't say anything” and if I don't like make that contact so I said hi to him and immediately it was like talking to a stranger. It was as if the person who I was with for two years and loved more than anyone I've ever loved was a completely different person standing in front of me.
Anyway that happened which was really quite awkward. He seemed like he didn't want to see me, not even that - he seemed like he was withholding something and I couldn't pinpoint what that was. It was like there's something that he's not showing me.
Cut to the next day, literally less than 24 hours later, I just had this again a gut feeling of like “Oh, that dude that he always told you not to worry about while you were together, you should like check his Instagram” so I checked his Instagram to which I found that: Yeah, they've been boyfriends since he dumped me on my birthday.
Having completely been an emotional wreck the days that followed. So that's the story there in terms of that.
I then go into that studio thinking, I don't know what I'm going to make today. Cause everything I write has to be so poetic and so meaningful and every single line has to carry like so much weight I really struggle to write.
I'm much much better at writing about something in hindsight so like once time passed. I can then look back and reflect on it, pick out the key things and make it really metaphorical and beautiful. When I'm in the middle of something, all I can think is like I'm so sad, I hate this, like all this stuff.
I’m thinking all I'm gonna say is just like so upfront and then Gabe Coulter who I made it with just starts playing this bass riff and it sounded really completely different than the chord progressions we usually use. I make him change a few tiny things and then we just went with it. It sounded so cool.
Literally the whole song just like arrived in the space of 10 minutes because it was literally like if I just word vomited everything that I had been feeling and I didn't realize how angry I was. I thought I was just upset.
We’ve got the melody, I go upstairs for some water and the phrase “I just think it's funny” comes to me. And I was like, “Oh my God, that's the hook.”
Continuing that with I just think it's funny that this, I just think it's funny that, you know, you slept with your best friend, who you also told me not to worry about. And then you became boyfriend with the other person you told me not to worry about.
And I just, you know, and like all this stuff it just came out and then obviously the bit that stuck and resonated with people most was the Piccadilly line again. We first thought it was a bit cheeky and a bit of an innuendo but like
you know kind of is isn't too obvious like i think it's been quite interesting so obviously the lines are
i just think it's funny
that you're somewhere in this city
used to share a bed
and now we share the piccadilly
every time i ride it
i feel closer to god
i hate that i still think of you
when i'm getting off
(at the stop)
It's really been quite hilarious watching like people who've been listening to the snippets be like “Oh, I get it”. It was a really interesting journey with the song and it just happened at once.
I think like the immediacy of it and how like up-front the lyrics are have actually been the thing that's resonated most with people, so it's been really exciting.
Bonnie: Describe “Funny” in three words.
Kai: The thing is the only word that was running through our heads when we were in the studio making this song was: cunty.
It's cunty, it's sassy, and I'd say it is closure.
It was a real closure for me in my head - that is the end of a chapter. He's not coming back and after this song comes out, there is absolutely no way that he will ever want to speak to me again. I like that I could bring myself that closure because he did not give it to me when it ended.
Bonnie: I'm writing poetry as well and I love when you write about someone like I got dumped right before New Year's Eve and I just wrote a bunch of lines of like “i thought you were cool / then i look at myself / in the mirror you placed / in front of my pretty face /you’ll never be as cool” (more poetry on ) It gave me so much closure.
Kai: It feels so much more powerful and I think that there's something really like a tortured artist and something beautiful about yearning for someone who's not a nice person. But actually it’s something more like empowering and that feels so good when you finally start making art that's like “No, I'm way better than you”.
Bonnie: What is your favorite lyric from the song?
Kai: I would probably say in the bridge, which is much more in line with the way that I usually songwrite.
two years would change my life beyond repair
I'll never love someone like I did you.
In the context of the song, it really takes it back to this place that it's like I hate you so much but I genuinely don't know if I'll ever love someone as much as I loved you and maybe that's for my own protection, maybe that's wrong and I'll meet someone and I'll love them even more but at the moment it feels like I shouldn't ever love someone as much as I loved him because that's how you get hurt.
I think it’s really this moment of silence and heartbreak among between all this anger in the song. The realisation where actually it's just again sadness and disappointment in disguise almost.
Bonnie: If you could send the song to any artist/band (dead or alive) knowing they would listen to it, who would it be & would you want feedback or rather just them listening to it?
Kai: I'm trying to think of who I love and who would like it, I think. Because the thing is, I wouldn't send it to someone who I know wouldn't like it. Like I probably wouldn't send it to Bjork or anyone. I'd probably, do you know what? I think I'd send it to Lorde. Because I just want to be her pal.
I think the way that she writes is so inspirational to me and the way that she evolves as an artist with every album really resonates with me. The constant changing and using each album as a cornerstone of her life and you can see the progression it's like a milestone basically.
I'd like to hear her feedback but the thing is it is what it is. It's just a sassy angry song. I think she'd see it for what it is and probably wouldn't give me much feedback. She'd probably say in her like in her in her Kiwi accent “Oh, this is really good”.
Bonnie: Do you have any honorable mentions for this song? Like any one you want to mention that gets printed in this interview?
Kai: Yeah sure. Honorable mentions … uh … my ex-boyfriend, his new boyfriend, his best mate who he shagged and also hmm who else … the Piccadilly line.
Kai Bosch’s legend is his mum. “I think like obviously you know there's so many kind of artists and people that have really inspired me and my sound but I think I wouldn't have stuck at it or done this if it hadn't been for my mum constantly being like putting so much belief into me when when no one else would. From the minute I said I wanted to make music and I played her that first song I made - like even though looking back, it sounds horrible - I really really thank her for being just as delusional as me. She's constantly stuck by me and is always the one person that stands by the decisions I make
His upcoming EP “Love, Throw Me A Bone” is coming out mid-April and he goes on headline tour from Brighton (30 April), London (01 May), Manchester (02 May) and Glasgow (03 May).
illustration done by @ruel0gy