Kate Hudson is everything you’d want her to be and more. Sitting down with American Songwriter for a Zoom call from L.A., she was open, friendly, and excited to talk about music …and that laugh—the one we’ve heard on movie screens over the years—is contagious. She may be well-known as an A-list Hollywood actress, who has starred in films such as Almost Famous, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, and Bride Wars, but at the core of the girl from Los Angeles, California, there’s a love and yearning for music deep within her soul.
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“For me, my relationship with music happened very young,” Hudson tells American Songwriter. “I think anyone who has music as a companion throughout their life, I think it starts really young, you get obsessed with certain records.”
The way she tells it, Hudson has always been a songwriter at heart, and is where she finds her happy place. She began rewriting others’ songs at an early age, but wouldn’t allow anyone to hear them. “I would never share with anyone, ever,” she reveals. It was then that acting got a hold of Hudson (her breakout role was as Penny Lane in the 1970s period film Almost Famous) and her career went, as she says, from “zero to one hundred very fast” and music was put on the back burner. “I realized and went, ‘Well, I guess that won’t happen for me,'” she shares.
However, that’s all changed now. Hudson’s happy place is being put on full display with her debut single, “Talk About Love,” the first taste of what’s to come from her debut album, due out in May. Written by Hudson, Linda Perry, and Hudson’s partner, Danny Fujikawa, the song will have you tapping your feet while longing for carefree love.
I am thinking bout this world and why / We always tear each other apart / Time to put it all aside and maybe have some fun / Don’t you say that you and I could never leave that world behind / So why your chasing all these butterflies / Just let them go now / Tell me baby nothing but the truth will do
Call me crazy / Cause I know it’s our time – me and you / I’m talking about love, she sings.
Hudson sat down with American Songwriter to talk about her latest single, her love of music, and her songwriting process. Check out excerpts from the conversation below (edited for clarity).
American Songwriter: Take us through how music came into your life and how it all started with music.
I had this little Fisher Price record player and I had 45s and I would listen to the Pointer Sisters over and over. There was one song called “Jump” and I would listen to it over and over again. And I had a Madonna track and a Van Halen track. But Madonna, I was in that era of young, young girls, so she was my Taylor Swift. I remember listening to her music and being like this is my future.
Then I would break it all down. I’d listen to a verse and I’d go back and I’d try to understand it, and then I’d listen to the pre-chorus. I didn’t realize that I was doing it at the time, but I would deconstruct music in my head to learn it. I realized that I didn’t share that with anyone else in my family, that I was living with. I would lock myself in rooms when I got older, and I would discover music on my own. My parents, my mom and Kurt, weren’t big music—there wasn’t a lot of music in the house. It was classical music and Kurt loves a little rock music. He loves ZZ Top and things like that. But I wasn’t raised in a musical household. I didn’t understand where it came from. So I would then start listening to, I remember when I discovered Neil Young and I tried to share it with my family, and they didn’t have the same kind of soul connection to it where I’m like, “What do you mean? This is the greatest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Then I just started to write.
For me, it always started with my poetry. I’d rewrite other people’s songs. So I would listen to a song. I’d listen to a Bob Dylan song, and I’d write my own lyrics over Bob Dylan’s songs or Neil Young’s song (laughs). But it was an exercise for me, like what would my words sound like to this music that I love so much if it was my young mind. Then I started playing the piano, and then it was just my secret kind of happy place. Writing music and playing music and singing was something I always wanted to do—musical theater—I love to sing, but writing, that’s where I would disappear to. Then when I started getting cast in movies, my career went from zero to 100 very fast. And at that time, if you became well-known as an actor, then trying to become a singer is sort of like, “Don’t break what’s not broken.” And so I realized and kinda went, “Well, I guess that won’t happen for me.” But I still kept it to myself and continued to write music.
AS: But throughout your career you’ve dabbled in music here and there.
KH: Yeah. For me, any movie that had music in it, was like, I’m ready and down. The concept for me of making a record, there were times that people were like, “Would you make a record?” And they were like, “We could get great writers. We could do this.”And I’m like, “That’s not how I see music.” For me, music is a process in which you give it everything. And it had to be authentic for me in order to do it, or else I don’t know why I’d be doing it. I don’t think that I would’ve been ready to put that kind of vulnerability out in the world to be judged and criticized if I was any younger than I am now.
[The pandemic] and the lockdown really are what made me realize that if I don’t make a record, it will be the great regret of my life, and I have to do it. So in [the pandemic], I just went, “I’m just going to start saying yes.” Because I used to say no a lot to people and singing with people and doing things, and I said, “I’m going to say yes every time someone asks me to sing, I’m going to say yes, and then see where that takes me.” And within six months, I was writing with Linda [Perry], and that was amazing because I’d never collaborated in writing. I’d never had anyone to push me with structure. And the muscle for me was so intimate that to work with someone who is facilitating it differently than I’d ever had was such a great writing experience.
AS: How did that partnership with Linda Perry come about? How did you connect?
KH: She heard me sing at this charity Zoom. I had recorded a song with a friend of mine, who’s a great songwriter/producer, and I recorded an acoustic version of a big hit song that he had done, and she heard it and just cold-called me. She was basically like, “What are you doing? Why don’t you sing more?” And I was like, “Well, I’m going to say yes. So that’s what I’m doing now, and I want to sing more.” But she’s like, “Well, do you want to make a record?” I’m like, “I’m thinking about it.” She goes, “Well come in the studio, and I got a song I’d like you to sing.” And I sang that song. And then after I sang it, she sat me down and said, “Do you write music?” And I said, “Yes.” And she said, “Well, let’s write some music together.” I was like, “Cool, yes.”
Then I put a month aside and I said, I’m going to just start writing music. And I went into it with, for me, I don’t want to have expectations of this, I just want to do it and not get ahead of it. So that was really nice because it was no pressure. It’s like I am not writing from a place of having to feel like I need to compete or having to feel like this is going to be my livelihood. I could write from the purest place and the most fun place. I could experiment. And we wrote 26 songs in two and a half weeks. We literally—it was like we couldn’t stop. At one point, we wrote three songs in a day, and we just looked through it. We’re like, it’s not even four. It was like, we need to stop at some point. We’re going to have four records, four albums.
There’s one song on the album that Linda and I wrote in 10 minutes. And it felt like a channeling. It was like it came through, and we just looked at each other like, “Wow. Okay. All right. We’re in a zone.” Danny Fujikawa, my partner, also wrote with us. So it was the three of us. And so fun and really, really wonderful for me to have a little intimate writing bubble.
AS: Was it important for you to write all the songs on the album?
KH: Oh, yeah. I remember at some point I did an interview when I was in my twenties, and I remember someone asking me, “Why aren’t you making a record?” And I was like, “Because it needs to be mine. I need to be ready to completely immerse myself in it. And that takes time and focus, and it won’t be like a half-assed thing. It needs to be all about the music. And that time, I guess, will present itself when it does.” So yeah, even lyrically and melodically, when I think about all of the music, every lyric is mine, every word. It’s just scary because, for me, it’s almost like showing this little piece of me I’ve never done that. I’ve always been able to hide behind other people’s words, but I’m not going to do that anymore.
AS: Are we going to learn more about who Kate Hudson is through your music as opposed to who we think you are through your movie roles?
KH: I think so. But my hope is that it will feel like—I’ve always been very honest. I am not very calculated. Sometimes I wish I was more calculated in my career, but I’m very spontaneous in the way that I do things. I think people feel that and know it. I think that for people who do know about me, the music will make sense. It’ll feel honest, and they’ll know that.
But yeah, the interesting thing for me is when I talk about the songs, because I realize that they are very specific and I have written them about things in my life that are very personal, but I don’t want to necessarily, at this moment, share exactly what that is because then people won’t have their own relationship to the song. Some of these songs I write from the perspective of a partner, about me.
AS: That’s an interesting perspective
KH: Yeah. So there are a lot of different places that I wrote from in this album, but they’re all very specific. So it’ll be fun.
AS: Tell us about the first single, “Talk About Love.” You wrote it with Linda Perry and Danny Fujikawa. What’s it about? When we first hit play, what are we going to hear on that song?
KH: It’s one of the more pop-centric songs on the album. It’s a really nice tempo that you dance to, but to me, it’s like the roll down the window in your car kind of song. What’s funny about this song is that we almost dropped the song. It almost didn’t make the record because when we wrote it, we loved the hook so much, but when Danny and Johan were producing it, we couldn’t figure it out. It just wasn’t working. Danny wouldn’t give up on it. He was like, “It’s too good. I got to figure it out.” And so he went into our home studio and just came out at midnight and was like, “I figured it out. I unlocked it.” And we went in the car and I was like, “Oh my God, it’s so fun.”
So the song had a very organic disco Donna Summer thing as we wrote it. But then when we got it in the studio, it was too derivative for me. I wanted it to feel more poppy, more like I wanted to hear it in a nightclub. So the organic nature that’s in a lot of the record, didn’t work as well with this song that I was trying to get to. We just figured it out. So we got that mix of the organic band feeling with more pop-centric sounds.
And then lyrically, you’ll see with the album, I like lyrics. I usually have to edit back my lyrics. I overwrite and then I edit. For “Talk about Love,” I really wanted it to have a narrative that told a story that felt like it was simple and clear, but the song kind of has a dual meaning. So the song as a whole is about we should be talking more about love. We talk about a lot of things, and we’re living in a very complex time. And the thing I think we need the most is to talk about it, talk about what love is and why it’s so hard for us. Why is it so hard to connect in that purest place? And then I wanted to turn that into a fun song that wasn’t too heady (laughs). I think that is really what the record is—it kind of encompasses the feeling of what the whole album will feel like when people hear it.
AS: Why did you want this to be the first song that comes from Kate Hudson?
KH: Because of the message of it. “Talk About Love” really embodies what the record is. I like the tempo where it sits as the leading song because there are songs on the record that do have more pop. There’s another song that’s probably a little even more poppy than this song. But then there are songs that really sit in Americana and some country influence. So I felt like this was the perfect lead-in. It’s so fun. I can’t wait. I’m excited for [the album] too, because there’s a lot to discover. I didn’t try to fit it into a genre. I just wrote what felt good and chose the songs that felt the best.
AS: You wrote all the songs on the album. Take us into your songwriting process. What’s your process when you’re creating?
KH: Oh, this is so fun to talk about (laughs). Writing this album was different because usually I just sit at a piano, and I write together. I’ll write a song on the piano. I do my gibberish, but then I like to figure out the song as I’m sitting there all by myself. And then I’ll go and lay it down with the sounds that I hear it. I’ll take it into my studio and then I’ll hear it. If I’m like, “Oh, I want this to be more guitar-focused or more organ.” I’ll put it in and sketch it out myself.
This process was way different because I was collaborating with Danny and Linda, and we kind of wrote the music and I had just kind of channeled crazy words and things and stuff would happen, and “Talk About Love” just came out of my mouth. Then I went back, had the songs, and then I went and wrote lyrics to my melodies. Then I would also go back and redo the melody and phrasing and all that stuff. So this was a little bit different for me. What I loved about this process was having a deadline. Because I’d never been in a situation where it was like, you need these lyrics done by Thursday.
I was like, “Oh, shit. All right. So I got to focus differently.” I really had to create space that I have not been able to afford myself in my life to really write in a really focused manner without walking away and being mom, and having to do other things. The things that came up for me as I was doing it like I was saying it, sometimes came from different perspectives. I would like the way something would sound, and then I would have to kind of access my life and also the feeling of the song. I have this one song that didn’t make the record called “Thunder Cloud,” and I love this song. It was because I was just in a situation where someone close to me, their child was suffering from depression and I just was thinking about these kids and putting myself in their shoes and thinking about how hard it is right now for them. So I told a story from my own personal experience but then created a different world. But it was too depressing for the album (laughs). I’ll do that another time.
AS: What do you think is the hardest part about songwriting?
KH: I’m such an Aries. I’m a perfectionist. I think being done is the hardest. That’s been the hardest thing for me. And the hardest thing too, but I got over it pretty fast, was writing really bad lyrics. I love music and I have everybody’s lyric book, Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan, I love reading people’s lyrics. The hardest thing for me was getting stuck and then just being like, “Okay, I just need to write a totally horrible, cheesy, shitty lyric because I need to just get it out.” And that was the hardest thing. What I realized was that the best thing to do was to make it be okay being bad. And then sometimes the things that I thought were bad, when I got in the studio, I was like, “You know what? I like it.” I thought I was going to hate it, and I like it. And then a lot of them, I hated (laughs) and I’d rack my brain. But that was the hardest was being okay, being bad, and then going in and working with people who have been doing this and are skilled and being like, “I know this is bad.” The best thing was then having that support, our little team, that could weigh in, and no one changed any of my lyrics, so that makes me happy.
AS: What’s the best advice you’ve gotten about music or songwriting?
KH: I think for me right now, it’s not advice, it’s how I was sort of raised up in music with my exes. They never made music for anyone else but them and their fans. And being uncompromising when it comes to music is really refreshing. And people can tell, I think. I think the best advice is what I’ve known through people that I’ve loved. It’s just to do it for yourself, and then give it away and hope that people make it their own and not worry about fitting into something. I really, really didn’t want to do that. And then, of course, I hope people like it. But yeah, I think with this, for me, it’s trusting what I like and then hoping that there are people out there who like that too.
AS: What’s next?
KH: Hopefully I’ll get to write music. I mean, I’d like to go into the end of my life writing for me or for people. I love to write music. Singing is one thing. I want to sit in a room with a bunch of people and beautiful artists and experience the collaborative writing experience with them. There’s nothing like it.
Photo by Guy Aroch
