Interview with D.K. Lyons: between love, illusions, and his new EP Darling Kiss Louder”

With his upcoming EP Darling Kiss Louder (out August 22), New York-based singer-songwriter and producer D.K. Lyons turns confessional pop-rock into a cinematic narrative. Mixing influences from Dante’s Divine Comedy to the seven deadly sins, Lyons has crafted a record that feels like both a personal rebirth and a cultural commentary.

We sat down with him to talk about love as both product and fairytale, the female gaze, and what it means to laugh, dance, cry, and repeat.

In Darling Kiss Louder you explore whether true love is something sold to us or a story we grew up believing. What’s the moment in your own life when you felt this clash the most vividly?

I think there was a huge conflict in my early 20s between the love that my mom had spoken about between her and my dad and what I was seeing play out in real life. Not to diminish my experiences at the time, but I was turning them into things they weren’t because of this north star that I had always romanticized as a kid, and because I had never really seen it with my dad passing when I was 6, all I had were the stories. And then of course the stories we consume in music, TV and movies paint these pretty pictures of love, so when you’re young and impressionable, you imagine these things you’ve consumed to match up perfectly with what will happen in your life and they obviously don’t. So that clash was a running theme of my life and I wanted to explore that in various contexts within the new EP.

You’ve mentioned Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Dark Ages, and a new Renaissance as inspirations. If this EP is a Renaissance for you, what are you leaving behind in the “Dark Ages” of your own career?

Phenomenal question. I look back on my previous work fondly for a lot of reasons, but I was making it as an absolute amateur when it came to the production, arrangements, and so forth, and I had to rely on a producer to really help make my songs sound professional. And I loved working with him and learned so much, but working with a producer is capital E expensive! So I used this EP as the driving force to finally learn how to do everything on my own, and even though I still had support from my collaborators, I owned ~90% of this project and finishing it was a huge milestone for me because it was something I’d never done. It feels like it’s opened up a whole new world for me where now I know I can do it and the future possibilities seem endless. So I hope my future projects represent that metaphor of coming into my own renaissance after being in the dark so long.

The project pays tribute to female music icons of 2024, but you’ve also been raised by strong women. How has their perspective reshaped the way you approach love, storytelling, and performance?

The women who raised me engrained so much into me, especially my mom obviously. I don’t think I was ever consciously aware of living with only women from the time I was 6 to 18. I was aware of my mom’s work ethic, her grace, her loyalty to the people in her life, and her love of literature. She’s an amazing poet and author and I pushed myself to become a better songwriter to impress her first and foremost. My love of the English language comes solely from her. Performance-wise, I probably owe my sister a lot because she has always had such a natural and captivating flair for the dramatic and for telling stories. Love-wise, there’s so much of it within my immediate and extended family, but it was always complicated by the tragedy of losing my dad and growing older, and having my own experiences has only heightened the profound sadness I feel for my mom in losing the love of her life and makes me appreciative and grateful for the love in my life.

You connect songs to deadly sins, greed, gluttony, while referencing artists like Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter. If you had to invent an eighth deadly sin to describe today’s digital culture, what would it be?

I think I would have to go with “Waste” because everything feels so disposable. You could argue that it fits within gluttony, but I think of that as more of excess consumption. However, I feel like the other side of that is the aftermath when we discard the remains. We waste a lot of our time on social media. Content in general right now is so disposable and wasteful. Even though it’s a powerful tool, AI is wasting vast energy resources to make weird distorted videos or a grocery list for us. Products we buy online in general feel cheap and only intended to be thrown away. So I see a lot of waste in the world right now unfortunately without a real vision of how to stop it.

Your mantra is about feeling everything, fully. When you think of the live release show for this EP, which of these four words do you hope the audience will carry home the most, and why?

I mean, honestly, I had a couple of really raw moments within the set, first introducing “cause baby, that’s life.” and talking through some of my mental health struggles and then talking about my dad before playing his favorite Tom Petty song, so I think the word “cry” was more present than any previous show. We always close our sets with “The Girls of Summer” and usually we do this thing where we get the audience to jump up and down during the solo, but this time we tried something different and actually stopped the song and had everyone turn to the person next to them and give them some sort of affirmation. It was cheesy, it was kitschy, but underneath it was real and raw and so special, and I think it really resonated with everyone and was a completely authentic thing for me to do because I am all of those things.

With Darling Kiss Louder, D.K. Lyons invites us to laugh, dance, cry, and repeat. Don’t miss the release of the new EP on August 22 and stream the singles now on Spotify.

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