“Suite 21” starts with a pulsing, menacing bass line, joined by crackling, skittering drums. Then organ and guitar create atmosphere, a hazy smoke. The stage is set. And Keila Myles is ready.
“Told you not to fuck with me you see,” she croons. “Now your ass is stuck with me you see / But I’m a peacemaker luckily you see / Piece maker more like cutlery you see.”
That gutting tone is altogether fitting for the latest video release from Keila Myles and the Moose Knuckles, who made it in time for NRP’s latest Tiny Desk Concert contest. The song is reworked, the take on it is new, but it’s about a crime perpetrated against Myles over a decade ago, the long hurt it caused — and how Myles learned how to survive and gather strength from it.
32-year-old Myles lives in Hartford now, but was “born and raised” in New Haven, living on Blatchley Avenue as a child, she said. She first sang in public in high school, at a pep rally, and started writing songs. She released her debut album, Just Add Water, in 2015; it showcased her wide-ranging musical sensibility, encompassing R&B and rap and adding some reggae and dancehall elements.
Her band, the Moose Knuckles — Betcherly Calixte on bass, Richard Kirby on piano, Tristan Sayah on guitar, and Jevonne Lashley on drums — is two years old. It formed when Myles secured a residency in 2022 at the Russell, “a premier upscale Jamaican-Caribbean restaurant” in Hartford, Myles said. The restaurant wanted a full name, and therefore, Myles needed one. She went online and said she was looking for a band, and ”a lot of people responded,” Myles said. She started with one set of people, but they couldn’t do every gig. She subbed people out until she ended up with a stable lineup.
“The people I’m playing with now are the people who kept playing with me, and we kept getting booked,” Myles said — including regular appearances in Hartford and New Haven. She showed up at Cafe Nine as a solo act in 2021. In 2022, she was a part of Seeing Sounds with drummer Jevonne Lashley in Edgewood Park and played Toad’s Place with the whole band. In the summer of 2023 the full band played the International Festival of Arts and Ideas. Most recently, they were at Jazzy’s Cabaret in November.
Myles’s music goes heavy on insistent rhythms, shifting harmonic structures, and rich soundscapes that speak of uplift. This is balanced by the lyrics, perhaps most acutely in “Suite 21.”
“‘Suite 21’ is a song about sexual assault. There’s no way to say that gracefully,” Myles said. “It was an experience that I went through, and it ended up becoming a song.”
The assault happened when she had just turned 21. “It was my birthday,” she said; she had passed out, and “someone took advantage.… It’s so awkward to talk about even now.” But she wrote the song just a few months later; even by then, while it was “about my tragedy,” it was also about “finding your power.”
She released a version of it on Just Add Water but “I never really performed that song,” she said, deeming it perhaps too personal, too heavy for many live audiences. So the song lay dormant for a few years, until in 2020 she was commissioned to do a performance that was “calling for that kind of content”; it was about women’s empowerment. She revisited the song and saw “how to make it better.” She “recomposed“ and “deconstructed” it, and now “it’s a full-blown story,” she said.
Singing the song now, Myles said, “feels cathartic. I get to scream and let it out. It’s the weirdest thing — you won’t necessarily know what I’m saying,” but “I get to rage in it. It feels so good.”
How does she feel about telling her harrowing story to the world? “Art should trigger you. Art should make you feel something, move you in some capacity. I want it to shake you,” she said. In that, she’s following the spirit of one of her guiding lights, Nina Simone, who said that she wanted people to “leave rattled,” to “feel the weight of the words.”
Myles’s honesty in her music also comes in part from being the mother of two kids. Sometimes, she said, “it’s very tempting to try to mimic the art that works that’s around me,” pop songs about sex and money. But “that’s not me,” and she’s not “gangsta” either. “I need deepness,” she said. “The only thing I have to give is my authenticity. I’m not here to waste your time. If I die, I can feel good about the art that I made.”
She also wants to call attention to the all-too-pervading problems of sexual assault. “It needs to be talked about,” she said — both the crime itself, and a way to come back from it. “Someone violated me but I took my power back,” she said. “It is foul. But it didn’t break me.”
It boils down to Myles feeling a sense of responsibility for the kind of art she wants to make. “There’s so much we cay say as artists. Why lead them down paths they don’t belong on, or tell them fairytales?” Not when there are so many artists who dig deeper, from Simone to Fela Kuti to Kendrick Lamar.
“They really care about their people,” she said. “That’s more of who I am. We got to be talking about something that matters.”
Find Keila Myles and the Moose Knuckles on Instagram for news about shows and other releases.
Is moose-knuckle another name for camel-toe?