Kiki T

Los Angeles songwriter Kiki Towner, who records under the name Kiki T, is a pop artist with a dark, moody edge and a songwriter's instinct for hiding the sharpest thing in the room behind something that glitters and she has quickly become one of the most prolific new collaborators in the city's writing rooms. Hawaiian-born, LA-based, and completely uncontainable, she describes herself as the love child of Jimmy Buffett and Paris Hilton. Island ease wrapped in hot-girl chaos. She owns it completely and honestly? It tracks.

Her path into songwriting, recording, and performing was anything but conventional. Growing up alongside a master-level classical guitarist brother and a prima ballerina sister, Towner always saw herself as the hot mess of the family. Before music found her, she burned through careers the way most girls burn through guys, usually two or three running at the same time. Photography overlapping with a fashion line, event planning bleeding into home remodeling, and somehow a PhD program in cognitive neuroscience tucked in somewhere before she decided a windowless room with fluorescent lighting for the rest of her life was pure hell.

Music arrived almost by accident. During the COVID lockdowns she was finishing a remote cabin build in the woods and listening to the Hamilton soundtrack on a loop. Towner woke up from a dream one night convinced she could suddenly rap. She wrote her first rhymes sitting outside in the dark with only her phone flashlight. "It was terrible," she says. "But not nearly as terrible as it should have been."

What started as a joke became a discipline. A month-long daily writing challenge expanded into a full year and by the end of it she had written hundreds of songs and knew she never wanted to stop. Six years later that experiment has become a full creative career. Honestly, the audacity!

Kiki T has drawn comparisons to two of pop's most genre-agnostic songwriters. Diane Warren has written across rock, pop, R&B, and country for artists including Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Cher, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, and Aerosmith, making her the standard-bearer for writers who refuse to be boxed in by genre. Bonnie McKee, who co-wrote six of Katy Perry's biggest hits including 'Teenage Dream,' 'Roar,' and 'California Gurls,' has also written for Britney Spears, Taio Cruz, Kesha, and Christina Aguilera, and unlike Warren, McKee has always had one foot on the stage as a recording artist herself. The comparison to both says something specific about Kiki T: a writer with the range to move across sounds and the performer's instinct to know what lands on the body, not just on paper.

Towner now runs four to six sessions a week, collaborating with producers including Olivier Bassil, Max Steger, Ryan Gladieux, Sly West, Alex Schindler (Schindy), Veronia, and Bobo dos Blotos. She approaches every session with the same philosophy regardless of genre. "Every one is a hypothesis," she says. "You're trying to figure out what the song wants to be."

That instinct has helped her build a deeply collaborative writing style, which is fortunate, because Towner still cannot play a single instrument or identify a note on a piano. "All the free space on my mental hard drive is filled with words and melodies. And somehow it's working." Thirty songs deep this year alone, it's pretty damn hard to argue with her. And trust us, you don't want to try.