Flower Face: The Best of What’s Next

Ruby McKinnon, the Montreal-based musician who releases albums under the name Flower Face, has been at this longer than her on-streaming discography may suggest. While her “debut” record, Fever Dreams, came out in 2017, her origins are much earlier than that—back when she was a teenager making lo-fi music in her bedroom, uploading projects to Bandcamp. McKinnon’s earliest influences were her parents—her mom is a writer of short fiction and her dad is a musician who’s been in and out of bands her whole life. “He plays every instrument, and he ended up working in radio most of my life,” she says. “So, he was always introducing me to new music and taking me to shows. He set me up with my first little recording interface when I was a very young teen.”

McKinnon, now 26, and I are the same age, and both of us came of age when the internet, and social media, were both still relatively green—or, at least, a lot greener than they are now. Her household growing up was very music-positive, and she began playing classical piano at the age of five—though she grew up with a familiar foundation: “I did get very, very into Tumblr, very into Bandcamp. I grew up with that foundation, and then I diverged into my own little world once I discovered the internet.” The classical piano part of it all stemmed from McKinnon’s parents believing that, in her words, “every child should grow up learning at least one instrument.” Having that musical bedrock made it easy for her to pick up other instruments, too. “I taught myself guitar, taught myself how to sing,” she says. “But, it also meant that I understood chord progressions, I understood harmonies, I understood these things that I was later able to translate into my own writing.”

Her relationship with the piano has fluctuated over the years. McKinnon was in lessons and doing conservatory until she was 16, 17 years old before teaching the instrument to children. “There were periods of time where I was like, ‘I don’t want to play any more of these classical pieces, I don’t want to fulfill all the requirements of the conservatory,’” she says. “But once I stopped doing that and stopped taking lessons every week and stopped doing exams, I found my way back to it in a different sense, where I’m like, ‘Oh, I can choose what pieces I want to play.’” McKinnon even had a phase where she was only playing Chopin, because he is her favorite composer. “I would just buy books on all of his nocturnes and learn those,” she explains. “I’m like, ‘This is what I really enjoy playing.’ When you’re in schoo, you don’t necessarily want to do all these things. But then, once you get out of school, you figure out the parts that you actually liked and you implement that into your life.” Now, she lives in an apartment with just a keyboard, though her dream is to have a grand piano around so she can “really get back into classical again.” “It’s a whole different world than songwriting, even when I’m using classical elements in my work.”

When McKinnon was younger, she had dreams of becoming a rock star. But those dreams faded when she got to high school. “I was a very good student and I was doing music, but I didn’t see it as a career,” she recalls. “I always thought, ‘I’m going to have a more conventional career.’” Even after she released a few albums on Bandcamp and grew something of an audience, music-making still felt like a passion project. When she was 17, McKinnon was diagnosed with stage three cancer and went through rounds of chemotherapy and surgery. “Honestly, I wasn’t sure if I was going to survive,” she admits. “It sounds so cliché, but getting out of that experience, I realized, ‘Okay, no, this is what I have to do, because I could literally die tomorrow. Why am I not pursuing music full-time? This is what I feel like I was meant to do. There’s so many songs that I want to write, there’s so much music I want to make.’ Things just kept growing after that, and it ended up working itself out.”

Fever Dreams came out two years after McKinnon’s cancer diagnosis and, in the time between then and now, she’s enjoyed some nice glimpses of widespread, online regard, especially with songs like “Angela” and “Spiracle.” She’s still precious about those early albums, like Baby Teeth, feeling connected to those songs while recognizing the different place she’s in—as a songwriter and as a person. “They are still my songs that I wrote,” she says. “When I started writing songs, I never really experienced anything in the real world. I’d never been heartbroken, I’d never experienced death or loss in any real way. Early songs that I wrote were almost works of fiction. I was so inspired by so many songwriters, and I learned from that—not even in the structural, writing a song side of things, but in crafting a story and writing these narratives within my work. I feel connected to everything I write, but they don’t feel as real or present to me as the songs that I’m writing now.” Those songs, which make up the newest Flower Face record called Girl Prometheus, are emotionally urgent and momentous—delineated from lived-in experiences and a self-history McKinnon is still building.

“Angela” became a major swing for McKinnon. It was the focus song track from Baby Teeth in 2018 and its popularity (17.5 million streams) came as a surprise to her, because it was almost left off the final tracklist six years ago. Virality has become an influential and non-negotiable part of our zeitgeist. Creators get a whiff of success and try to mold their brand or sound or shtick around that, in an attempt to manufacture their own buzz. Some musicians embrace the act of going viral, and some don’t. But it’s becoming something we at least have to recognize and talk about. “Does a song going viral change you?” I ask McKinnon. “I didn’t expect it to go semi-viral at all, really,” she replies. “I’d grown a decent audience and had some streams on songs, but that one really blew up. I think somebody posted it on YouTube, and now people have gotten tattoos of the lyrics. I play it at shows and people are singing along to every line. You never expect it. You can’t plan for it. You can’t force it. You can’t write a song and say, ‘This is the one that’s going to be successful.’ But, I’ve learned you have to just go with it. I’m glad that song made the cut. Now, when I’m making a tracklist, I don’t want to cut anything. What if that’s the one? But, I can’t try to write something because I think it’s going to be successful. I have to just write for myself.”

Encountering a tattoo of her own lyrics in the wild is a surreal thing for McKinnon, a gesture of devotion still incomprehensible. “I can’t even wrap my head around it,” she says. “The biggest thing about making art, making music, and putting it out there is that I will write something and it’ll mean something to me, but it’ll mean 1,000 different things to 1,000 different people. Once you write something and you put it out into the world, it transforms. It’s not yours anymore. That’s difficult, sometimes—like, ‘No, it means this’—but it’s really beautiful to think that I could create something that could mean enough to somebody that they want to immortalize that on their bodies.”

Girl Prometheus marks a great evolution in Flower Face’s sound, as she vaults her tomes of heartbreak and longing into 10 great, string-imbued songs that are as gentle (“I want to be untouched and clean”) as they are untamed (“You make your mouth the sun, you swallow everyone”). McKinnon is lovelorn and fabled, singing, whispering and screaming in languages of touch and tongue-in-cheek self-acceptance. Girl Prometheus isn’t a break-up album about any one person or any one relationship, but a collage of aftermaths simmering into reinforcements of comfort. Coming out of The Shark in Your Water two years ago, Girl Prometheus sounds bigger and wider—atmospheric synths measure the vastness, while orchestral ensembles nurture the scapes into narrower build-outs. For Flower Face, that kind of transformation is a relentless, necessary act. “It’s always a goal of mine, to keep pushing the sound further and to keep making it bigger,” McKinnon says. “Since I started making music, I’ve always been into really big, cinematic sounds. Even with thos first few records that I was making at home with my laptop, it was all happening on a little keyboard and it was all computer sounds, but I was chasing this really huge, almost euphoric cinematic break in every song.”

If you’re in this business long enough, you’ll hear the word “cinematic” tossed around by countless artists who are all chasing that big, blockbuster image in their work. McKinnon is more enchanted by the drama of film soundtracks, and she often looks to the Dessner brothers’ arrangements on National albums for inspiration. “I’ve always loved the way they use string parts in their songs,” she says. “When you go after these cinematic sounds by using orchestral sounds, you can create an entire world. You can create an entire film within a song. It feels like it translates across mediums—where each song feels like its own little world, or feels like it’s a movie, and you have these rising and falling actions.”

McKinnon’s career has progressed enough already that she has seized opportunities to work in bigger studios and work with string sections. The demos she made for Girl Prometheus went in a different direction than what the final cut of the record sounds like. “And I was very set on that,” she says. “But then, once you break it open and deconstruct and reconstruct it, it can move into a completely different world. On The Shark in Your Water, we had real strings but we had only one string player come in and do multiple parts. We recorded it in an afternoon. For Girl Prometheus, I was able to have an entire string quartet come in and record live off the floor. It’s so much bigger. It’s so much more immediate.”

Despite her classical background, Girl Prometheus marks the first time McKinnon used her “music theory brain” while in the studio. “We booked this string quartet and, obviously, they’re incredible musicians—very professional,” she says. “We only had a few hours with them, and we had nine songs that we wanted strings on. My producer, Marcus [Paquin], and I talked about it, and he was like, ‘We have to give them sheet music. We have to tell them exactly what we want them to play. They’ll play it perfectly, but there isn’t room for messing around with chord charts or experimenting, really.’”

After recording all the instrumentals, McKinnon and Paquin had about four days between that and their session with the string quartet, so McKinnon downloaded a notation software called Finale and wrote all of the sheet music for the ensemble in less than 48 hours. “I’d written sheet music for piano as a kid and in theory classes, but I don’t do that for my songs now,” she says. “I write chord charts, I play by ear, so it was a huge undertaking and it was very stressful. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to do it. I was like, ‘I’ve never written sheet music for a cello before,’ but I managed it and it was, honestly, the proudest moment of the whole process for me—being in that room and watching these players play from the string music I wrote and hearing it come to life.”

Taking her childhood lessons and employing them into moments of precision—of certain intonation and certain notes being executed exactly as she imagined by a string section she built herself—was a full-circle moment for McKinnon. It was the most technically challenging part of making Girl Prometheus, but the most rewarding once the computerized blueprints became the real, beautiful deal. “Spending 14 hours a day for three or four days, on my computer, just writing the sheet music and listening to the software’s fake violin sounds—string sounds built it—and they sound awful, because it’s these awful synths, but I’m like, ‘I hate the violin, this going to sound so bad. This is going to be awful. Why am I doing this?’” she recalls. “But then, hearing it actually played, I was like, ‘I love it, it sounds great.’”

Inviting other people into her Flower Face world hasn’t always been the easiest gesture for McKinnon to make. “It’s definitely been a process of letting other people in on the production side or during instrumentation—having my guitarist say, ‘What if I tried this?’ or a producer saying, ‘What if we change these sounds?’” she says. Still, even nearly a decade and four albums in, McKinnon finds that the “little control freak” part of her lingers within her still, if only because she’s so used to having her hands in every part of every record. “There’s something so beautiful about hearing a track and saying, ‘You know, I wrote all of this myself and I had a vision in my mind of how it would sound and here it is, playing out in front of me,’” she affirms. “I’m never more proud of myself than I am while listening to a mix that I get back and hear the progression, especially compared to the music I was making when I was younger.”

McKinnon has always identified as a writer, even in her earliest years making music—going as far, now, as calling herself a “solitary writer.” “It’s how I grew up doing it, alone in my room, writing and recording and producing everything myself,” she says. Flower Face is a project definable by its attention to misery and desire, even when McKinnon was writing about grief she hadn’t yet experienced. But her work always surrenders to that part of the human condition, and her portraits of love and loss make for tiny, gnarly, heavy-hearted tragedies slowly unspooling (“I want you the way that I want to be eaten alive,” she sings on “Skeleton Key”). Though its title alludes to it, McKinnon wasn’t reading much Greek mythology while making Girl Prometheus. Instead, it stems from Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. “My friends and I went to see it, and it opens up with the quote, ‘Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.’ Me and my friends love the movie; we saw it a few times. We would always say that quote to each other. And my friends started saying, ‘You’re kind of like Prometheus, because you stole love from the gods and you taught a man how to love, and now you’re being tortured for eternity in exchange for that.’ So, they started calling me ‘Girl Prometheus,’ and all these things fell into place.”

Girl Prometheus songs like “Eternal Sunshine,” “Biblical Love” and “Cordelia” arrive as brilliant, crushing, tortured articulations of the very things McKinnon yearned so desperately to capture eight or nine years ago (“I miss my prepubescent body, I miss my 10-year-old dreams / Now I sleep with a knife, I’m baptized in the night”). “It feels a lot more personal, a lot more real, and a lot closer to my heart,” she says. “Something that I found was that, yeah, I was writing all these heartbreak songs before I’d ever experienced it—songs about loss and grief and, at the time, I hadn’t been through it, but, even now, a lot of those songs feel very prophetic. And a lot of the feelings that I’m describing when I’m 14 and have never been in love are things that I did end up feeling when that happened. It makes it feel like this cosmic thing beyond us—like, all these feelings already existed within me and, as I go through life, I’m unlocking them.”

In a sense, those early Bandcamp releases, like Every Part of You That’s Left in Me and Homesick, prepared McKinnon to write the Girl Prometheus songs and activate the part of her that can turn those feelings into a piece of music that, maybe someday, will become a tattoo on someone else’s body. “It feels like I’m preparing myself and preparing my heart and soul to feel those things and transform them once again,” she says. “When I was writing Girl Prometheus, I wrote the whole thing in this red notebook that I got because I went through a big break-up. I bought this notebook and I was like, ‘I need to write in order to get through this, because I’m on my own for the first time. I’m in a city. I’m far away from my family. I don’t have anyone, so I’m scared.’ The notebook became my best friend. I would have it with me when I would go out to the bar, or I’d be in the park or in cafes. Writing really does feel like a friend. Writing has become a survival tool for me, and a great comfort.”

Because McKinnon began making and releasing music at such a young age, she quickly got used to giving parts of herself away in her art—making herself vulnerable and hoping that the people she’s singing this melodramatic, emotional music to are still listening. “I was too young to feel that kind of embarrassment yet,” she says, “so I think it was good timing, because I started when I was still very starry-eyed and very ‘everyone wants to hear what I have to say.’ I developed an ability to deal with the discomfort of vulnerability that I now am able to push past that.” As Flower Face, McKinnon doesn’t tour often, but she does get hit with flickers of self-indulgence on stage. “I’m like, ‘I’m up here singing about how sad I am about this thing that happened. Why would anyone care? Why would anyone want to hear about this?’ But, I have to remember that, the reason I’m doing this is because, for this many years, people have continued to listen and continue to hear the songs and want to listen to them. Like, ‘Yeah, I’m singing this song about how sad I am about someone who broke my heart, but there’s 10 people standing right in front of me and each one of them connects it to something entirely different in their life.’ People have continued to connect, so I will continue to create. They’ll take from that whatever they will.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.