By Annabel Ross
Fittingly for an artist known as King Princess, Mikaela Straus is not about to be told what to do. The Brooklyn-born, mainly Los Angeles-based musician might be just 23 years old, but when one of her heroes tried to throw his weight around in the studio recently, Straus wasn’t having it.
“I was like, ‘Wow, big man over here! Big boy alert!’” Straus recalls, laughing. He was instantly dismissed from contributing to her second, newly released and widely acclaimed album, Hold On Baby, but by this point the indie-pop star-in-waiting had already assembled a team of top-shelf collaborators including Mark Ronson, who signed Straus to his Zelig record label in 2018, Aaron Dessner of The National, and other pop hitmakers including Shawn Everett, Tobias Jesso Jr and Ethan Gruska.
King Princess, aka Mikaela Straus, has released one of the year’s best albums in Hold On Baby.Credit:Simon Lakeman
Still, there was never any question as to who was boss. “My vibe in the studio is, ‘I’m the captain,’” says Straus with the insouciant charisma of someone unreasonably good-looking and talented. “You’re either gonna get on the ship, or you’re gonna get out. And that doesn’t mean that I’m not challenged, I just think I work best when I don’t feel insecure about anything and am not made to feel lesser. I’m not used to feeling that way and it’s not really how my team operates.”
Straus is talking via Zoom from her childhood bedroom in Brooklyn after a hectic four days that included a slot at Lollapalooza, her first headline gig in two-and-a-half years and performing on Jimmy Fallon. She’s bare-faced and gorgeous, all unkempt shaggy hair and glowing skin, and puffs on a weed vape pen as we chat, pausing occasionally to pour herself some more red wine.
Straus has been unapologetically herself from the get, kicking off with her first hit, the 2018 lesbian torch song 1950, which racked up millions of streams after Harry Styles tweeted its lyrics (Straus was later chosen to support Harry Styles on the European leg of his 2020 tour before the pandemic snuffed the opportunity; she’s since opened for Kacey Musgraves, Shawn Mendes and Red Hot Chili Peppers). 1950 was inspired by the Patricia Highsmith novel The Price of Salt, the basis for the 2015 movie Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara as two women embroiled in a forbidden love affair.
Similarly out and proud songs followed, including Pussy Is God and other horny odes to female homosexuality (Straus identifies as gay and non-binary). You’d think we might have reached the point where lesbian sex wasn’t seen as a transgressive act, but as long as her message reaches the right people, Straus is unfazed by the undue focus on her sexuality. “There’s gonna be kids who will read this interview or will read the lyrics to my songs and feel seen,” she says. “To me the impact I can make is a lot more important than my own feelings about getting asked what it’s like to be gay 15 times a week.”
Straus’ musical journey began in Brooklyn, where her father, Oliver, has run the Mission Sound recording studio since 1994 (fascinatingly, Oliver’s great-grandparents are Isidor and Ida Straus who infamously drowned together on the Titanic; Isidor was also a co-owner of Macy’s department store but Straus says she inherited no fortune from her family). Growing up, the Williamsburg studio was Straus’ playground, where she learned about songcraft and how to play guitar, bass, drums and piano, and brushed shoulders with famous musicians.
“I watched your nation’s queen, Sia, write a song in the studio when I must have been like, 12,” Straus recalls. “And then I remember a few years later she was a guest judge on The Voice, and I was like, ‘Dad, that’s that chick from the studio!’ And he was like, ‘Bitch, that’s Sia,’” she deadpans.
Her mother, Agnes “Aggie” Mullaney, was a singer whose influence was as formative as her father’s, Straus says (her parents divorced when she was three). Cleaning out the basement of her childhood home the other day, “I pulled out this guitar that I haven’t seen in ten f—ing years and it was the first guitar that my mum got me,” says Straus, who wrote her first song when she was five years old and was offered a record deal from Virgin Records at age 11 (she declined, deciding she wasn’t ready). “It [music] was just my jam, it was just my thing,” says Straus. “I make music because I can’t not make music, it’s how I process my feelings.”
King Princess’ new album Hold On Baby features production from Mark Ronson and Aaron Dessner.Credit:Sony Music
After attending one progressive New York high school, where her sexuality and gender identity was no big deal (she knew she wasn’t a girl before she knew she was gay, she told Rolling Stone), and another where she won a scholarship after submitting a CD of her songs, Straus headed to the USC Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles, only to chuck in the course after a year to focus on her own music. Before long she’d secured a meeting with Mark Ronson, with whom she instantly connected.
“Mark and I work together in a really interesting way because I’m a producer and he’s a producer and I feel kind of like his apprentice or protege, I’m not just a chick who writes songs,” says Straus, who’s as enamoured with acts such as Led Zeppelin, Jack White, Oasis and T-Rex as she is with contemporary pop stars (her assortment of pets includes goldfish named Stefani Germanotta, Adele and Jazmine Sullivan). “I’m a nerd about gear and analog stuff, and he’s an encyclopedia of music knowledge, so it’s like having a master class in front of you at all times.”
King Princess at the Thom Browne Fall 2022 fashion show in NYC in April.Credit:Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
The admiration is obviously mutual — just a couple of days ago, Ronson surprised Straus just as she’d started playing the first gigs to support the new album. “He came to f—ing Chicago, bless his soul, and he rolled up to my show and he gave me an envelope.” Straus teased him — “I was like, ‘Is this a gift? It looks a little small,’” — but inside was a cardboard cutout of the Fender Pino Palladino bass guitar she’s been playing in his studio since they met. Ronson is having one made for her. “I was like, you motherf—er, this is so sweet,” she says. “I was nearly crying.”
On Ronson’s Zelig label, Straus has released an EP, Make My Bed, the 2019 album Cheap Queen, and a bunch of singles, most of which revolve around sex, toxic relationships and hedonistic coping mechanisms. Straus found herself taking a gentler, more introspective route on album two, written during the pandemic and equally concerned with the tribulations of a long-term relationship as with her relationship with herself.
Her partner, Quinn Wilson, a creative director for Lizzo, is name-checked prominently on the rueful, romantic, Winter is Hopeful, while Change The Locks, blossoming from folksy country into an anthemic chorus, is about “the dysfunctional sapphic experience of codependency,” Straus declared on her Instagram. “There’s so many gorgeous elements of being in a queer relationship, but the unity and friendship you feel together can also be completely overwhelming,” she wrote. “Everything in queer love feels heightened, the good and the bad.”
Sex Shop, a liquid R&B jam, describes her insecurity around being accepted by her partner in the event she decides to change her body; crunching rock ballad Let Us Die, featuring Taylor Hawkins on drums (“so kind, so supportive” says Straus of the late Foo Fighters star) celebrates a Thelma and Louise calibre ride-or-die relationship. On I Hate Myself, I Want To Party, Straus’ thirst for fame gives way to getting blazed and playing video games during lockdown, her ambition blunted by ennui and depression. “It’s talking about mental health mixed with a need to be seen,” she says. “I was like, ’Oh well, there’s my thesis, you know, and I know that other people feel that way, especially in this world of social media and accessibility to everything.”
Vocally, she inhabits different moods across the record, dishing up breathy St Vincent levels of drama on Hold On Baby Interlude and whispery falsetto on the Kate Bush-channelling Dotted Lines. “I am a person of the stage and I like to be expressive with the way I sing and communicate my words and I felt comfortable doing that and not feeling embarrassed or weird about being that person because that’s who I am,” she says. “I’m just trying to do my theatrical, extra, gay-ass poem reading for you.”
Even a star as determinedly in control of her own image as Straus — see her Instagram for a mix of high fashion glamour and unfiltered tomfoolery with mates — isn’t immune to record label pressures and streaming targets, and she bemoans “the pie chart of it all, like, ‘What are your numbers this month?’ That shit is f—ing unbearable.”
“I think if you talk to any artist, whether they’re being honest about it or not, they’d feel the same way,” she says. “It’s like, how do you appease the man, the corporate girls, and how do you do what you want to do, and what’s the balance?”
If you ask her fans, she’s managing the balance pretty well, skirting ever closer to stardom without losing sight of who she’s doing it for, and why. Straus recalls meeting Lady Gaga at 19 years old and the impact it had on her. “I was like, ‘Gaga, I’m gay,’ and she hugged me and I was like, I want to be that, I want to help people with my music,” she says. “If my pain and suffering and debunking my own trauma is helpful to people? Take it.”
King Princess’ new album Hold On Baby is out now. She will be supporting Florence + the Machine on their Australian tour in March 2023.
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