Topeka Clementine performs live at KPBS and talks cooking, art, viral moments and music as action

Episode 31: Topeka Clementine Transcript

Julia Dixon Evans: Here's Topeka Clementine.

[Applause and Music]

Evans: Kai Simovich, aka Topeka Clementine, is one of San Diego's most prolific musicians — and one of its great storytellers.

Kai Simovich: Does anyone here know the story of the Estonian Revolution? Yeah, let's go. OK, so you can fact check me on this one.

Evans: They mesmerized us, our coworkers and even a few San Diego State students passing by, with an inspiring and interactive performance for our new KPBS Sun-drenched Sounds live music series.

Simovich: This is turning into a jam. This is actually all been an audition and you passed, and now you're in the band.

Evans: Through their songs and our conversation, we learned how Kai went from working as a professional chef at one of the world's top restaurants to becoming a viral indie rock artist, anxiously tracking follower counts, to the relentlessly hardworking artist-activist they are now — someone deeply committed to changing lives through live music. And they know how to put on a show.

[Topeka Clementine performs "Sheep" live]

Evans: From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.

[Theme Music]

Evans: After the patio performance, Kai followed us back to our studio for an interview. Their answer to our standard mic check question — "What was the last meal you ate?" — was unusually detailed and honestly kind of perfect.

Simovich: What I had for dinner last night… Ooh, man, I made a pasta puttanesca. I like got some canned tomatoes and I like sauteed them down and I got some shiitake mushrooms, like cut them into little cubes and got those going. Then my friend Will, who's in a couple bands in San Diego, he came over to jam. So I just let that simmer while we were jamming. You wanna know my umami hack? Actually, it's kind of crazy. Little spoonful of miso in the pasta sauce.

Evans: I just used miso last night.

Simovich: We're miso mates.

Evans: Miso's hot right now.

Simovich: Miso is hot right now. It's all the rage.

Evans: And yeah, we're rolling.

If it's not already clear. Kai actually has serious culinary credentials and cooking was their first real career. Before music became their full-time focus, Kai apprenticed at Amass, a world renowned restaurant in Copenhagen.

Simovich: I would sometimes just like to go back to cooking. I was like a professional chef for five years before I became a music person. And that's like something I was actually properly good at. I don't, I don't feel particularly skilled at music. I just, I just can't stop. With music, I'm constantly breaching the unknown and it just gets very exhausting and there's so much decision paralysis. Whereas with cooking, I know how to just sort of be a cog in a, in a wheel, and here's what the menu is today. Make it good.

Evans: But it seems that kitchen work ethic has stuck with Kai. Since launching Topeka Clementine as a musical project in 2022, Kai has released more than a dozen albums and EPs. Kai also approaches performing with the same fervor. Part of my work at KPBS involves scouring show listings each week to pick recommendations for our arts preview, and I just kept seeing Topeka Clementine in lineups week after week — headlining, supporting, everywhere. Who plays that many shows and puts out that much music that quickly? It turns out someone who treats music like both a craft and a calling. I remember thinking, OK, fine, I'll listen. And just based on an adorable fried egg album artwork, I queued up "Breakfast for One."

[Topeka Clementine performs "Breakfast for One" live]

Evans: We'll start with "Breakfast for One." Can you tell us how the song originated and what it means to you?

Simovich: It's funny that that song came from a very real, deep emotion of just like getting ghosted, which is so, it's silly in retrospect because I, well, I obviously don't talk to that person, but I don't know, I just don't feel the emotions in that same way anymore. It was just a very silly crush gone wrong in retrospect, but it felt so intense in the moment.

But it became a viral sensation because of the piano bit I did in the beginning.

["Breakfast for One" piano riff by Topeka Clementine]

Simovich: So many people have used that. I think Premier League Soccer used that. I think like..

Evans: Wow

Simovich: I think Ford Bronco used that. Yeah. Like, but I didn't see a penny from any of that because it was just on Instagram, you know?

Evans: That is bonkers. Really?

Simovich: Yeah.

Evans: Wow. And like there's nothing that an artist can do.

Simovich: I didn't even get my publishing sorted until after all those things happened, so there's probably some royalties I could have been making. Some people said there's like lawsuits I could take, but I don't, my time is so precious, I don't wanna spend any of it in litigation if I don't have to.

Evans: It's such a double edged-sword because you want your songs…

Simovich: Oh yeah.

Evans: … to be that, to like be the trending audio.

Simovich: Yeah.

Evans: Because that's how kids discover music.

Simovich: Yeah. It's interesting. I don't know, I'm still very grateful that it's gotten exposure. Your audio has its own little metadata section and then you can see like, oh, 70,000 people used it today, like, not today, but like over the span of it existing. I don't know. I used to be a lot more into the numbers. I was very obsessed with that kind of stuff, and then I kind of slowly realized that it doesn't really matter at all. Yeah.

Evans: Did you feel almost like a sense of, it's in my better interest to not pay attention to these numbers? Or is it more just like, no, this is not important.

Simovich: It's just literally not important. It's like I have, you know, I have 70-something thousand followers on Instagram, and I'll still play to like a bar of eight people. It doesn't change how you can properly actually bring people together and catalyze them toward a feeling. And it doesn't have any say on the kind of world you're building. I think live performances are music, like that's when the music is 'cause music is a verb.

[Topeka Clementine performs "The Ballad of One Eyed Mike" live]

Evans: Kai's music does feel active, not just because of the audience participation or the stories woven between songs, but there are clear calls to action embedded in their music. At its core, there's a genuine, deep-seated activism spanning issues that are global and universal to the hyper-local, like down to a single intersection.

On our KPBS patio, Kai told us the origin of the band name and how it's connected to the unhoused community in Oceanside and the people who care for them.

Simovich: So the name of the project is Topeka Clementine, but I'm from San Diego. It's from a street corner. It's not from Topeka, Kansas. It's from a street corner in Oceanside. There's Topeka Street and there's Clementine Street and every Wednesday morning, my friend Jordan, he goes out there and he outfitted a trailer to be these shower stalls, and he helps provide access to clean, warm running water to all of our houseless neighbors. This is inspired mostly by a man named Mike. This is "The Ballad of One Eyed Mike," as you may have guessed, Mike has one eye. I don't call him One Eyed Mike to his face. That would be very rude. I just call him Mike. But the thing is, I know a lot of homeless Mikes, I also know a lot of Mikes that live in houses. I think it's just a really common name, and I think the point I'm trying to make is that we're not all that different, and your housing status doesn't determine what human rights you should have access to.

[Topeka Clementine performs "The Ballad of One Eyed Mike" live]

Evans: You also performed "Ballad of One Eyed Mike." You tell the story when you perform it. What does it mean to you to share that one?

Simovich: It's just an important story to tell. I think it's important to note too that Jordan is an inspiration to me in that…

Evans: This is Jordan from…

Simovich: …humanity showers.

Evans: … human showers.

Simovich: You know, he started as a street photographer and there's other street photographers that will take pictures of houseless folks and put their photos up in the gallery and tell their story and get all this exposure, and then none of that really trickles back down to people at the street level. But he would always end with an interview and he would always ask, what do you need right now? And nine times out of 10, someone said a shower. So he was like, OK, well that makes my next move very clear. I'm gonna do this. And it was based on the ask, what do you actually need? And then how can I make that for you? Rather than, oh, you look like you need a new shirt. Here's a new shirt.

[Topeka Clementine performs "The Ballad of One Eyed Mike" live]

Evans: Topeka Clementine is also, in many ways, a philanthropic project. It may not be overwhelmingly lucrative, but Kai still manages to make an impact with whatever they earn from shows locally and touring around the country.

Simovich: I'm in a very privileged position in that I live in my family's home for free. And so a lot of the other basic necessities of like food and rent and things aren't really a problem for me. They're not something that keep me up at night or that I stress about, and therefore I am able to, you know, take all the income I make from a show and give it to Abood's family. My friend Abood, who lives in Gaza, who I've been in contact with, I've been managing a GoFundMe for them. And I do put proceeds that I make from shows. Anything that doesn't go into immediate gas or food goes to helping them out.

Evans: Music and activism go hand in hand for Kai from fundraising to storytelling.

Simovich: So in Estonia, they have a singing festival called Laulupidu. Every year they get together and they sing folk songs, songs of their homeland. And when they were under Soviet occupation, like in the '80s, they were only allowed to sing Soviet propaganda songs until one year they all just showed up and decided actually, mm, nah, we're gonna sing all the old songs. And it's really hard to shut up like 15,000 people, 15, 20,000 people when they're all just singing a song. Like it's really hard to get them quiet. Like they brought out a marching band and they tried to play over them, but the people were just too powerful. So that is how the Estonians say they sang themselves free. Not a single drop of blood was spilled in the Estonian Revolution. They sang themselves free. We gotta come together, we gotta lift all our voices together as one and decide on something. So yeah. Let's do one more. Let's do one more round of these. Let's just at least get step one going, huh?

[Topeka Clementine performs "The Ballad of One Eyed Mike" live] 

Simovich: There we go. Thank you.

Evans: More from Topeka Clementine and how grief recently reshaped their life after the break.

[Topeka Clementine performs "The Ballad of One Eyed Mike" live] 

[Applause]

Simovich: This is one I wrote pretty much right after the death of my mother. Sorry, this got heavy really quick. I lost my mother to cancer three, four months ago. Grief is weird. It stretches your time in a very interesting way.

Evans: Can you talk about the newest song you played, "Feed the Trees"?

Simovich: "Feed the Trees." Yeah, I can. It's an ode to Mother Nature. I mean, it was just, it was so raw, right? I was attending my mother's deathbed vigil, and then on the screen here, there's like people being abducted. And I think it came from a place of feeling like I wasn't doing enough at the time. But I also had very important priorities I was dealing with.

Evans: Can you talk about how she plays into that song?

Simovich: Yeah. I mean, well the first line "heirs to death our mother makes us," you know, I think on a micro level that is like my mother, my own mother dying, and now I am, I'm an heir to death, but also like Mother Nature, yeah, we all are heirs to death, like that is our inheritance. That's the one thing we know we'll get for certain.

"Sweet are the berries from her vine." My mom has this blackberry bush that was going off, during as sort of summer ended. She died on the solstice, the summer solstice. But also I think of like the parable, I think people, some people have called it the Sap Parable, but I learned it as like a berry where you're being chased by this monster to the edge of a cliff. And then you start climb, you see a vine and you start climbing down the vine. And you look down and you see like there's the same monster at the bottom. So now there's one up there, there's one down here. And now you're just hanging onto this rope and then a mouse climbs up and it starts gnawing away at the vine. And then you look over and there's like a berry there. And like it is just that moment, like that's all we really get is like that one moment. Imagine how sweet that berry is, like when you're just on the brink between inevitable destruction.

[Topeka Clementine performs "Feed the Trees" live] 

Simovich: And then yeah, "fragile are the minds that come to take us." Thinly veiled look at like ICE officers, like they are, they're, yeah, they're, they're, they're fragile. They're, they're so, they're shattered in their burdens and like that's how the system designed it so that they feel so helpless that the only thing they can do is put their humanity up for auction.

[Topeka Clementine performs "Feed the Trees" live] 

Simovich: But yeah, "bend and yield to hands that come to break us." I think that comes from Tao Te Ching, like bend and you need not break. Like a fresh twig, like it snaps back and that way it doesn't destroy itself.

[Topeka Clementine performs "Feed the Trees" live] 

Simovich: "When the last bomb falls, I hope my ash can feed a tree" and then there will still be some trees. There will still be some kind of nature. Once the human experiment is over with. It's like a resignation that it's not gonna happen in our lifetime. But that doesn't mean we stop 'cause it's not a sprint and it's not even a marathon, it's like this daylong trek through the desert, but that's also a relay race and like someone just happened to pass me the baton

Evans: To Kai, an unrelenting hope is the antidote to despair. You could just follow Kai's music and activism on Instagram. Maybe even use the "Breakfast for One" piano riff in your next reel. But you can also catch a show. Topeka Clementine plays all over San Diego County and in Kai's words, the performances are the music.

[Topeka Clementine performs "Feed the Trees" live] 

Simovich: Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, this has been, you've all been Topeka Clementine. Welcome. Yeah, have a great day. Drink water. Love your neighbors. Check up on your friends. Make sure they get home safe. For real, like, yeah. Cool. Yeah. I love you.

Evans: A special thank you to Kai of Topeka Clementine for their help with this episode. Thanks to the Sundrenched Sounds team at KPBS for putting on a great show. You can find the full video of Topeka Clementine's set on KPBS' social media and YouTube.

We're off next week, but in two weeks on The Finest, Folk Arts Rare Records has been open since 1967, a feat for any small business and nearly a miracle for a physical music store. And for the people who work there, record collecting isn't just a hobby, it's a way of building community.

Andrew Mall: A lot of people are finding fulfillment in like everyday rituals.

Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. This episode was written by Anthony and me. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.