Holy Wars: “Do I want to talk about death forever? Not at all. I just don’t know what else to say” - Kerrang
Holy Wars: “Do I want to talk about death forever? Not at all. I just don’t know what else to say”
For a decade now, Kat Leon has felt that death has never been more than a couple of steps behind. Losing both parents in the space of six months became the impetus to start Holy Wars, and saying goodbye to her big sister was what fuelled imminent second album Shadow Work / Light Work. It’s all about not succumbing to the darkness, she explains, and embracing every moment in the sun…
- Words:
- Sam Law
- Photography:
- Ana Massard
- Trigger warning:
- Suicide
Kat Leon thinks about death maybe 30 times a day. Whether through injury, illness, accident or the slow creep of old age, it is a cruel inevitability waiting for us all. For some, the Reaper is a spectre inexorably gaining in the rearview mirror. For others, he emerges as a brute, waiting to ambush round the next blind bend. For Holy Wars’ defiantly unbowed vocalist, soaking up Los Angeles’ spring sun, he has become a frequent visitor, a thief of joy, a dark muse in the peripheral vision, always driving her towards the light.
“It feels like the Grim Reaper is never more than two steps behind me,” she nods, with a smile that is equal parts strength and woundedness. “Yes, death and bereavement will come for us all. It just so happened that they surrounded me much sooner than expected – and took my whole family. In my life, loss has been so prevalent. Death has come to define me. I didn’t choose that, but I can choose how it affects me. This is my story. These are my battle scars. I choose not to be a victim.”
Holy Wars’ superb second album Shadow Work / Light Work, to which we will come, is a poignant, powerful chronicle of finding the balance between hope and despair, of navigating via darkness back into the glow.
“Going about your day to day, you think you’re gonna live forever,” Kat shrugs, gently. “You don’t cherish your time here. Only with this experience do you realise, as humans, how fragile we are.”
Kat was born for the stage. Her mother Sharon started with plans of being a nun, but eventually traded those for dreams of becoming one of Radio City’s precision dancers The Rockettes. Meeting Kat’s father David was key to that change of heart: a “cigarette-smoking race car driver” whose cover band The Scorpions even once received a cease-and-desist letter from the German originals.
One of Kat’s earliest memories is being three years old, seeing her older sister – her “idol” – dancing in front of an audience for the first time. Within 24 months, she too had thrown herself into theatre and dance. Writing her own songs inspired by heroes like Radiohead, Fiona Apple and Alanis Morissette would facilitate a sideways step into the more purely musical world, but taking part in a song competition with Alice Cooper on the judging panel would be truly formative.
“He asked me, ‘What’s your story? Are you in a band?’” she remembers. “That experience gave me this unapologetic confidence to do it. I was so green, but that can be a beautiful place from which to start because you have no fear at all, you don’t know how long or hard the road can be.”
Kat half-laughs that first band Sad Robot was her “growing years, where you say to people, ‘Don’t look over there!’” But it also honed her musical ability and, via auditions, led the most important person in her life to her front door: musical/life partner, and second half of Holy Wars, Nick Perez.
“Then in 2015, both of my parents died,” she emphasises how abruptly the rug was pulled. “My mom had been sick, a five-year illness called [cardiac] sarcodosis: a kind of autoimmune condition which causes pulmonary hypertension and for which there is no real cure. My dad was completely unexpected. We’d gotten to a point with my mom where they told her that she had six months to live, with a heart transplant having a 20-30 per cent chance of success. They’d done a procedure with a kind of balloon inflated inside her heart to give us time to decide what to do, and my dad had to mix her medicine daily to store in the fridge – or drive 90 minutes to the hospital for it. I guess he was under a lot of pressure, and he dropped dead of a heart attack three days later.”
Kat pauses a moment, still shaken by the memory. Then she goes on. Her father died on Saturday, April 25. She said goodbye to her mom on another sorrowful Saturday: October 10 that same year.
“It’s funny,” the words spill out. “Well, it’s not funny. It’s fucked-up. But my mom didn’t want the transplant and she just went on morphine to the point where she wasn’t really with me those last six months. Going through both, I think I had a harder time with my father’s abrupt death than my mother’s long, drawn out passing. At my mom’s memorial service, I overheard one of my cousins saying, ‘Well, she loved her dad more because she cried at his memorial but not her mom’s…’ That was disgusting behaviour. At least with my mom I knew that she wasn’t in pain anymore.”
Kat’s own pain was only just beginning, however. Looking back at the period between 2015 and 2017 there are memories that pierce the veil – going from living with her folks to walking around their house all alone, arranging funerals, clearing out their possessions with Nick, selling the old family home – but most of that time is lost in what became a sickening swirl of depression.
“I wasn’t really there,” she nods. “Not to make it too heavy, but I had a lot of dark thoughts and thought that maybe my time was up. I cut off all my hair, I dyed it blonde, I couldn’t even think of myself as my parents’ daughter anymore. I couldn’t look in the mirror and see them but know that they weren’t here. My sister tried to be there for me but she was in the process of going through a divorce and becoming a single mother. I was on suicide watch. Full disclosure, I tried to [kill] myself in my own way, but I didn’t have the courage to do it.
“Both of those deaths defined my life in a way that I will probably never fully comprehend. They left me questioning my own existence, having the worst thoughts about myself and everything around me…”
Full Article: https://www.kerrang.com/holy-wars-kat-leon-interview-shadow-work-light-work-death-loss-cover-story
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