Issue 010: Kimora Is Learning to Leave Something for Herself

For most of her life, Kimora never questioned whether music would be part of the future. She only imagined the future looking a little different.

Born in Las Vegas and raised in Gardnerville, Nevada, near South Lake Tahoe, Kimora had been singing for as long as she could remember. Some of the first photos her parents took of her were recital pictures, microphone in hand, when she was only a few years old. By the time college came around, she had a clear destination in mind: New York City, a musical theater degree and eventually Broadway. She followed that plan all the way through graduation, earning the degree she had set out to get before songwriting unexpectedly began pulling her toward a different world.

Her father had always been one of the biggest believers in that dream. Kimora describes him as a serious businessman, someone who does not invest his time or energy casually, which made his support particularly meaningful. If he believed pursuing music was worth the effort, Kimora trusted that belief. Still, her path was not without moments that made her question everything she had built her identity around.

During her sophomore year of college, Kimora lost out on a musical theater role she desperately wanted. The rejection hit harder than she expected, enough that she still compares it to the worst heartbreaks she has experienced in relationships.

“That was the worst heartbreak I think I’ve ever experienced in my life,” she says.

For a moment, she wondered whether music was something she wanted to continue at all. Instead, she finished the degree, began writing more seriously and eventually found encouragement from songwriters who made her believe there might be another way forward. Broadway had been the dream, but songwriting started becoming the thing that felt increasingly like her own.

Finding a Different Kind of Voice

Kimora now describes her sound simply as pop-country, but the influences underneath it tell the story of an artist whose musical education stretches well beyond one genre.

There is Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl, a natural connection to the theatrical world she came from. There is Joni Mitchell, whose writing has been a major influence. And there is Taylor Swift, an artist Kimora is completely unapologetic about admiring.

“I’m a Swiftie, so I’m proud of that,” she says. “She’s influenced me a lot in terms of work ethic and songwriting.”

Listeners have also drawn comparisons between parts of Kimora’s music and Kacey Musgraves, particularly connecting Musgraves’ “Butterflies” with Kimora’s own “Dog Days.” But the real thread running through Kimora’s songwriting has less to do with any single sonic reference point and more to do with the life behind the songs.

Heartbreak appears often. So does anxiety. Kimora talks candidly about having lived through relationships and situations that gave her no shortage of material, but she does not view songwriting simply as documenting what went wrong. Writing gives her a way to take something difficult and reshape it into something she is proud to carry forward.

“I absolutely love writing and creating what I’ve been through into something that I’m proud of,” she says.

Anxiety has become another recurring part of that perspective. Kimora says living in New York City pushed it to an extreme, while Nashville’s slower pace has felt more natural. The goal is not to pretend those experiences never happened. It is to turn them into something someone else might recognize in themselves.

She hopes listeners can hear a song about heartbreak or anxiety and feel a little less alone inside it.

Turning Heartbreak Into “Dog Days”

If someone is discovering Kimora for the first time, she points them toward “Dog Days.”

The song actually began as a poem while she was living in New York. Kimora entered it into a poetry competition and placed second, a result that made her particularly proud of what she had written. Later, she carried the idea into a songwriting session with Dustin Bird and Brian Maher. It was the first time she had ever met Bird, who would eventually become one of the collaborators most closely connected to her current music.

What they created became a song about one of the oldest stories in the world: loving someone who does not love you back.

Kimora is considerably less delicate when she tells the story herself, joking about the guy as a frat boy who “couldn’t give a shit” whether she lived or died while she remained deeply attached to him. The humor does not erase the hurt, but it does reveal something about the distance she has gained from it.

That transformation is central to the way Kimora thinks about songwriting. Her local bar plays “Dog Days” from time to time, and hearing it unexpectedly still feels surreal because she remembers exactly what she had to experience before that song existed.

The relationship may have hurt.

The song is something she gets to keep.

“Leave Me Tennessee”

That idea of keeping something for herself becomes even more literal in Kimora’s next release, “Leave Me Tennessee.”

When she originally planned her move to Nashville, she thought she would be making it with her boyfriend. The relationship ended before the plan became reality, but the connection did not disappear overnight. After Kimora arrived in Tennessee, the two stayed in contact. There were conversations about reconciliation, about him potentially finding a job in Nashville and about trying to rebuild what had fallen apart.

Looking back, Kimora has a clearer perspective on those plans.

“I guess in hindsight, it was probably a lie,” she says. “I think I was lying to myself and I think he was too.”

That emotional limbo became the foundation for “Leave Me Tennessee,” written with Brent Baxter and Dustin Bird. The title is less about literally leaving the state than it is about asking someone to stop following her into every part of the life she was trying to rebuild.

Kimora did not feel ready to move on, but she understood that she needed distance if she was ever going to.

“I just wanted him to leave me one thing that I could have to myself and let me move on,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to move on from him. I just wanted him to let me go so that I could.”

That tension gives the song its center. It is not a clean breakup anthem written from the perspective of someone who has everything figured out. It lives in the uncomfortable period where someone knows what they need long before they actually feel ready for it.

“Leave Me Tennessee” was written by Kimora, Baxter and Bird, with Bird also producing the record and Grady Saxman playing drums.

In many ways, the song feels like a snapshot of the larger change Kimora has been experiencing since the move. Tennessee was originally going to be part of a relationship.

It eventually became part of her independence.

Learning How to Be Alone

When Kimora talks about the life experience that has shaped her most recently, she keeps returning to the breakup not because heartbreak itself is unusual, but because of what it forced her to confront about herself.

For years, she had poured much of her time, energy and identity into another person. When that relationship disappeared, she suddenly found herself living alone in a new city, far from her family, trying to figure out who she was without a partner occupying the center of her life.

“The experience outside of music that has shaped me the most is a breakup,” she says. “What I learned about myself is how codependent I was on another person.”

That realization was uncomfortable, but Kimora also credits it with making her stronger. She had to learn how to take care of herself, build a life by herself and invest time into the parts of herself she had neglected.

Her music was one of them.

“I didn’t put anything into myself or barely my music,” she says of that previous relationship.

Now, she is trying to reverse that.

Kimora aims to write constantly, sometimes pushing herself toward a song every day. Not every idea turns into something worth keeping, and she is comfortable admitting that. Some days produce nothing. Some days produce songs about things that do not matter. The point is continuing to exercise the muscle.

She wants to become a better writer, discover more of her own sound and build the discipline necessary to eventually make music her full-time career. Doing that while also bartending is not easy, but the work is becoming part of how she defines this chapter.

What Nashville Has Taught Her

Nashville has also demanded a different kind of confidence than the one Kimora developed as a performer.

Working as a bartender at a popular Nashville bar regularly puts her around strangers, celebrities and people she once might have found intimidating. She has learned how to stand up for herself, carry herself with more confidence and move through social situations with a kind of grace she says she did not always have.

The music business brought another education entirely.

Kimora knew the Broadway world. Nashville’s industry operates by a different set of rules, many of them built around relationships, introductions and knowing how to navigate a room without losing yourself in it. She has also become more conscious of the darker side of that lifestyle, particularly the constant opportunity to go out, party and blur the line between networking and simply exhausting yourself.

The challenge has been learning how to participate without letting the lifestyle become the career.

“Nashville has made me a lot stronger for sure,” she says.

One room in particular has become important to her Nashville story.

The Shelby, an intimate venue overlooking the city, hosted Kimora’s first writers round after the move. She later returned for her own show and still considers it one of the spaces that feels most connected to her growth as an artist.

“The sound is the best in Nashville,” she says.

There is something fitting about that being one of her favorite rooms. Kimora once went to school to stand on stages performing stories written by someone else. The Shelby became one of the first Nashville rooms where she was able to stand in front of an audience and sing stories that belonged entirely to her.

Building a Career That Can Last

Kimora is ambitious, but she is also surprisingly practical about what she wants from music.

Like almost every artist who moves to Nashville, she can imagine the giant version of the dream. The huge career. The massive audience. The kind of success associated with artists like Taylor Swift.

But she understands how statistically rare that life is.

When she moved to Nashville, Kimora gave herself a goal that felt both meaningful and achievable: make music a livable career.

“I’m just grounded in the fact and pray that I’m able to have a career in music that is livable for life,” she says.

A conversation with Bird helped her sharpen that definition. What she loves most is not the attention around the music. It is making the music itself. Writing a song, building it with people she trusts and eventually creating enough stability from that work to support the life she wants outside of it too.

Kimora wants music to be sustainable enough that someday there can also be marriage, children and a family without having to abandon the creative work that got her there.

Over the next year, that means releasing more songs, writing better songs, forming stronger connections and hopefully moving closer to making music her full-time work.

The larger dreams are still there.

She would love to collaborate with Tyler Childers, particularly on an unreleased song called “Wine and Whiskey.” The song was inspired by grief, and the person at its center was a Childers fan. Kimora says she still imagines what it would mean for him to someday hear the record, even if the collaboration itself never happens.

Then there is the Grand Ole Opry, the stage she talks about with her dad when nerves start creeping in before a smaller Nashville show.

She hopes that one day she can look back on those early gigs from inside the Opry circle.

“I hope one day I can clip this and then I’ll be performing at the Grand Ole Opry,” she says.

Writing the Things She Cannot Keep

Not every song Kimora writes is about romantic heartbreak.

One of the lyrics she is most proud of comes from the unreleased “Wine and Whiskey,” written while processing grief.

“Don’t leave me hanging, I’m holding on to you / Your name’s around my neck, and you’re a memory I can’t lose.”

For about a year after the person passed away, Kimora wore a necklace with his initial. Eventually, that physical reminder found its way into the song.

It is a quieter form of loss than the anger behind “Leave Me Tennessee,” but both songs reveal the same instinct.

Kimora writes to hold onto something.

Sometimes it is a memory she does not want to lose. Sometimes it is a part of her life she wants someone else to stop taking from her. Sometimes it is simply proof that an experience that hurt can become something she is proud of.

That may also be why the fan reactions that mean the most to her are beginning to change.

Kimora has spent most of her life being told she can sing. She is grateful for those compliments. But recently, listeners have started specifically telling her that they connect with the writing.

For someone who has always known she was a singer but only recently began understanding herself as a songwriter, those comments land differently.

Kimora hopes that writing eventually reaches people far beyond her own circle, but there is one audience she particularly wants to inspire: young Asian women, along with anyone who has experienced heartbreak, anxiety or the kind of anger that comes from trying to rebuild yourself after something falls apart.

That makes Issue 010 feel less like the story of an artist who moved to Nashville to become famous and more like the story of someone gradually becoming responsible for her own life.

She came to Nashville after a lifetime of identifying primarily as a singer and started becoming a songwriter.

She arrived still emotionally attached to the relationship she thought would come with her and learned how to live alone.

She once thought Broadway was the only version of success that made sense and discovered another kind of stage entirely.

And if Kimora could go back to the version of herself who first started seriously pursuing this career, her advice would be considerably less philosophical than everything she has learned since.

“Break up with your boyfriend immediately.”

It is funny because it is Kimora.

But after hearing the full story, it also sounds like the beginning of everything that came next.

“Leave Me Tennessee” is technically a song about asking someone else to let her go.

Kimora’s larger Nashville story may be about finally learning how to do that for herself.

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