Caroline Kingsbury’s Pride 2022 Playlist for COOL HUNTING
This track list features dramatic dance-floor numbers and tales of empowerment
For our Pride playlist this year, LA-based queer indie-pop recording artist Caroline Kingsbury looked to a recent personal experience to inspire an energized, expressive and empowering track list around the self-selected theme “Chaotic Pride Breakup.” Kingsbury—who recently released a five-track EP, Remixes from Heaven, following her boldly textured and genre-spanning 2021 debut album, Heaven’s Just A Flight—chose songs she herself has been listening to following the end of a relationship. Each year, Pride represents a diverse range of deeply personal feelings and experiences that echo throughout the LGBTQ+ community and unify the individuals within. Kingsbury’s 14-track playlist presents sensations many will relate to and most will undeniable enjoy.
“My starting point was can’t hate myself into a different shape by my friend Brimheim,” Kingsbury tells us. “I started listening to her new album when we connected about writing [together]. It was like every single song on the album felt like a queer breakup anthem—and the title of the song, ‘can’t hate myself into a different shape,’ also feels like a metaphor for how LGBTQIA+ people process their identity while coming out and for years after. It’s such a beautiful sentiment. You can’t change yourself into something else by hating yourself. Loving yourself as you are is the only option to keep on really living.”
Kingsbury also included two tracks from her remix EP, including the dance-floor worthy ‘”Kissing Someone Else (remix by Josh Lumsden),” which she explains was made to be a Pride anthem. It’s big, bold and beautiful. Kingsbury’s musical future is a bright one, with collaborations and highly anticipated performances on the horizon. As for Pride this year, she adds, “Pride is acceptance—radical acceptance of who you are and all the beauties and the faults that reside inside of you.” It’s a sentiment our editorial team emphatically supports.
Images courtesy of Caroline Kingsbury
