Fans Of Kina!

Musician Kina Grannis got her start as a YouTube star and is now a popular singer-songwriter. –Courtesy photo

If there was ever a musician who has exploited the full potential of the Internet, 26-year-old Kina Grannis is certainly one.

Buoyed by the success of her recent album “Stairwells” and the more than 6.5 million views her “In Your Arms” video has garnered since it was first posted on YouTube in November, Grannis has proved to be an artist who has planned out her life and career pretty well.

She’s been on tour for some time this year, playing shows the world over, and has been heading back west across the mainland since April to close out with a couple of sold-out solo concerts in downtown Honolulu.

Speaking by phone a couple of Fridays ago from a tour stop in Madison, Wis., Grannis said that with all the extensive time on the road, “every day has been both the same and different. I try to get a walk or run in in every city I go to, and have some kind of routine amongst the madness that happens sometimes.

“It has been pretty crazy since the beginning of this year, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, visiting Europe, Asia and Australia. Seeing people coming out to my shows and singing my songs with me, it makes me grateful.”

KINA GRANNIS Where: Nextdoor, 43 N. Hotel St. When: 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday Cost: Tickets sold out Info: www.bampproject.com

What has been of definite help has been the corporate sponsorship of Jelly Belly, whose tasty confections were on prominent display in the “In Your Arms” video. Grannis and her collaborators spent 22 months using stop-frame animation and 288,000 jelly beans to make what Time magazine called one of the 10 most creative videos of 2011.

For that, Jelly Belly got Grannis a much-needed tour bus. “It’s helped make doing the shows more fun. Before these tours I was always traveling in rental cars, and because it was jam-packed and stressful, and cutting into my sleep, I always got sick. Now I get to sleep so much in my own bunk bed, and it’s kept me a lot healthier.”

Good health is a big factor in Grannis’ life. Not only does she run on a regular basis, but she’s helped raise funds for the Leukemia & Lymphona Society through her Run Team Kina group.

With the help of constant online appeals to her fans — as well as the download sales of her emotional “Make It Go” song, written to deal with her mother’s diagnosis of blood cancer — Grannis exceeded her initial goal of raising $50,000 for the L&L Society, instead giving close to $72,000 in the form of a grant and helping finance additional organizational services.

“While the society is a cause close to my heart, the other goal of Run Team Kina of individual challenges towards better health is just as important,” she said. “On the whole, if I can help anyone make little changes they want to achieve, in the end it can only do good for ourselves.”

Grannis has been training to do an upcoming 13-mile half-marathon since January “with a set number of runs a week and a long run on weekends,” she said. “I did do a Nike women’s marathon a couple of years ago, and it was the craziest and most powerful thing I’ve ever done.”

ALWAYS A musician at heart since she was a child, the Los Angeles-based Grannis said she started playing shows after high school and all through her college years at the University of Southern California.

After graduation she relocated to Austin, Texas, where in 2007 Grannis joined YouTube, made a music video for her “Message from Your Heart” song and entered the Doritos Crash the Super Bowl national contest. For her efforts she won a recording deal with the major label Interscope.

“I had then moved back to L.A. and was just beginning to survive off of my music. The record deal posed an interesting situation for me. I was officially signed to Interscope, and it all seemed so exciting at the beginning, but after meeting with the label people, I found their vision of me as an artist was not the same as mine. They had plans to develop me as an act and co-write with other people. In the meantime I already had an album written out, and music has always been really personal to me. I’m the type that writes in the middle of the night, sorting things out in my life. Luckily, I was able to get out of the deal a couple of years later, and I’ve been on my own ever since.”

Now Grannis has been enjoying the good fortune garnered from her “Stairwells” album, and album tracks like the aforementioned “Message from Your Heart” and “In Your Arms,” plus “The One You Say Goodnight To.”

And her Hawaii visit should rekindle memories of small-kid time.

“My mom was born in Wahiawa before she moved to California, so my whole childhood, there’s a connection to Hawaii, because I remember as a kid I would visit there pretty often.”

With her work schedule finally winding down in August, Grannis said she’ll start focusing on writing for her next album. “The urge for writing while on the road doesn’t happen for me. … I’m always about making music that moves me and comes naturally to me.”

–Gary Chun

Honolulupulse.com

paolotabuena

Kina Grannis Live in San Francisco – Safe and Sound
The Fillmore 5/17/12

I also took photos of the show.
Check it here: http://www.behance.net/gallery/Kina-Grannis-Live-in-San-Francisco/3975371

Helping Janet Find Her Perfect Match

Daily Bruin arts and entertainment blog that brings you news, profiles, reviews and event coverage from around the UCLA community. Check back daily for all the latest in arts and entertainment.

Image Courtesy of Kina Grannis

Kina Grannis is currently on her “In Your Arms” world tour and will come to Los Angeles on Friday. One of her supporting acts, UCLAalumnus Jesse Epstein, also known as Imaginary Friend, will open up the show. Grannis talked to the Daily Bruin’s Marjorie Yan about touring, filming her music video featuring approximately 300,000 jelly beans and what it was like self-funding her album “Stairwells.”

Daily Bruin: How is being on tour so far?
Kina Grannis: It’s been pretty insane in a good way. I just did the Europe one in February and then I just did Australia and now we’re … into the U.S. one. It’s kind of been a giant blur, but it’s been so fun because I’m seeing a lot of crazy places. … It blows my mind every night when I’m sitting there singing and at some point it dawns on me that I’m in “blank” country and these people are singing my songs. It just goes to show how … there really are no boundaries when it comes to the Internet, and I’m super grateful.

DB: Tell me about your “In Your Arms” music video and filming with all of those jelly beans.
KG: It was pretty crazy. I first heard the idea from the director. At first he said it would take a while, and … I thought it would take a day or so. I was thinking a month, and so we had that in our minds starting, and then it would be three months and it rolled on by and … very quickly we realized we had no idea what we’re doing. It ended up taking 22 months, and it was a very difficult process because everything was so meticulous, and physically it was … kind of uncomfortable … for everyone working on it. … Psychologically working on a project when you never know when it will end is a little difficult. It was tough at times, but we were also in love with the idea we were working toward and we were excited about it so we kept trekking on.

DB: How would you say your life differs now that you turned down the record deal and working as an independent artist?
KG: This is how I imagined how it played out: If I stayed with the record deal, I don’t think I would have let them change me so much. They would have forced me to write a new album with a songwriter, which I wouldn’t have liked. I would have tried to have kept it as me as possible. My gut feeling is as a result of that, they would be afraid to push it because they wouldn’t know if it was going to be successful enough and it would’ve just been shelved. … I would just be sitting around not getting to connect with people. I would not get to put up my videos and not get to tour. In that situation, it’s up to the label where they can do anything. Artistry-wise, I wouldn’t have changed, but I would have been held back and not able to have as much interaction as I do now.

DB: What was it like self-funding and self-recording “Stairwells”?
KG: It was a lot more than I expected, but it was an amazing learning process and it was definitely a great time. I thought I would record it in a month and it ended up taking almost a year to do in full. I basically spent my life savings on it too. It was my first real album and I’m so excited about it. … But I really learned about how much goes into every single step in the process and how easy it is to lose a song in producing it. … You have to treat it very delicately. … You can’t bury the character of the song, but you have to find the way for each song to fully enhance what it is. It was a great experience and I learned a lot, and for the next album I’ll be more prepared in terms of what I’ll go through.

DB: What can people expect from your world tour?
KG: It’s mostly “Stairwells” and I throw in a couple of new songs here and there. The show is … me and my cellist, and he sings the back up harmonies and it’s very casual. I like to create an atmosphere as if I’m inviting people into my living room. … I like to hear from them and see their faces, and it gets awkward sometimes but it’s fine. I just want it to feel like we’re hanging out and have it be intimate.

DailyBruin.com

kinagrannis

San Francisco & Los Angeles shows! Ticket links below.

Thursday May 17 – The Fillmore, San Francisco
Tickets: http://www.livenation.com/event/1C00482DDEC97921?dma_id=324

Friday May 18 – The Ford Amphitheater, Los Angeles
Tickets: http://www.ticketmaster.com/event/0900482CCF605F7C

I’ll be playing both shows with my sisters Misa & Emi and cellist Keith Tutt II! Imaginary Friend will be opening of the shows

See you soon!!

March 11th, 2012. A singer song writer Kina Grannis came to HongKong to start her Asina Tour. My friend asked me to shoot the video of her concert and interview for his own project.
Kina Grannis is simply an amazing woman. I do follow her music but her live show gave us what the music is. It seems quite ambiguous, however, her songs represent her true messages and we can feel it from words to words.
Not only her beauty but also personality make people happy and relax.

Kina Grannis, simply amazing.

You don have to subscribe my channel, but please do subscribe her channel below.

Kina Grannis-http://www.youtube.com/user/kinagrannis?ob=0&feature=results_main
YaoXuFilms

Video may not have killed the radio star, but it nearly defeated quirky California folksinger Kina Grannis, who spent 22 months with director Greg Jardin filming a stop-motion animated video for her single “In Your Arms” — using 288,000 jelly beans.

For more than 2,300 meticuous frames, she posed on a plexiglass table, with elaborate bean scenarios spread beneath her.

“We’d spend over an hour building one frame, then I’d come in, lie on the glass, and he’d take one picture,” she says. “So most days we’d get less than a second of footage completed.”

Everyone attending Grannis’ “In My Arms” world tour — which hits San Francisco on Thursday — will receive free jelly beans, compliments of sponsor Jelly Belly, which donated the multicolored candy the video project required.

The exotic-featured artist — who calls herself a “half-Japanese, half-European mutt” — first tapped into visual energy back in 2007, when she got a YouTube account and began posting home movies of herself crooning her increasingly complex originals.

“When I made my first video, it was just for fun, and YouTube at that point was just a video-hosting site,” says Grannis, who initially filmed with her laptop, then gradually went more hi-tech via Flip cameras, Canons and studio-quality microphones.

When that featurette, “Message From Your Heart,” made it into a Dorito’s Crash The Super Bowl contest, she says, “I had to ask people to vote for me online for two months straight, so in exchange I thought I’d make a video every day — that’s when I realized I’d stumbled onto something really powerful.”

Indeed. She won the contest — plus a contract with Interscope Records — but waived it to stay indie with her recent fourth effort (and “Arms” parent album) “Stairwells,” just reissued in a deluxe two-disc edition.

Originally, she asked Jardin to direct her lissome “Valentine” ballad, but he proposed the minor-chorded shuffler “Arms” instead.

“When Greg said ‘Jelly beans! Are you in?’ I said ‘Of course!,’ thinking it might take only a month,” says Grannis, 26. “And being independent, the budget was very small — basically whatever I had in my pocket — so he wrote up a pitch to Jelly Belly, and they loved it.”

To date, more than 6,500,000 fans have watched the singer wend through her sugary backdrops — even become a bean creature herself — on YouTube.

Grannis is justifiably proud of her breakthrough video. But she’s also relieved it’s finished. “Because there was a part of me that thought, ‘This may never end!’” she says. “This could be the rest of my life, just lying on glass in uncomfortable positions!’”

If you go

Kina Grannis
Where: The Fillmore, 1805 Geary Blvd., S.F.
When: 8 p.m. Thursday
Tickets: $28.50
Contact: (415) 346-6000, www.livenation.com

 

SFexaminer.com

Kina Grannis performs ‘In Your Arms’ in the Take 40 studio!

Head to http://www.take40.com for more great acoustics!

take40australia

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