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AUGUST 2017 16 SUPERFRUIT

on finding a creative space outside of pentatonix

04 LENA STONE

20 SAVANNAH OUTEN

44 EMILY WARREN

on being a female voice in country music

on finding her place outside of youtube

on working hard and finding success with songwriting

06 MALCOLM KELLEY

24 LINDSAY ARNOLD

46 CHARLIE WORSHAM

on returning to acting and the importance of detroit

on taking oppurtunities as they come and her love of dance

on being an artist and his new album, beginning of things

10 DANIELLE BRADBERY

30 JILLIAN JACQUELINE

50 SDCC CLASS OF 2017

on learning to write songs and her upcoming album

on writing honest songs and not forcing herself into a box

featuring the stars of teen wolf, once upon a time, riverdale + more

34 CANDICE PATTON

on dealing with rejection and the need for diversity

CATHERINE POWELL

publisher, editor, photographer, designer, writer

SAMANTHA BAMBINO

STACY MAGALLON

writer

SHELBY CHARGIN

IAN HAYS

VANESSA SALLES

ELIZABETH FORREST

AUTUMN HALLE

OLIVIA SINGH

writer writer

lena stone Words by IAN HAYS Photos by CATHERINE POWELL

Lena Stone is here to make a difference. The country singer-songwriter is stepping out from behind the veil to show the growing number of female songwriters that are ready to make a change in a male dominated industry. Lena hails from the “tiny, tiny town” of Carlisle, Massachusetts. As she puts it, “There are as many cows and horses as there are people. There’s Ferns Country Store, an ice cream stand, and that’s about it.” She is the oldest of three sisters, who, you guessed it, all sing. While her parents are a doctor and a lawyer, that didn’t stop the music from flowing once they left the office. The music genes can be found a generation back in her father’s mother, her “favorite person in the whole world”. Lena’s grandmother was a music therapist. This gave Lena an early understanding of the therapeutic and healing qualities of music that traditional therapy can’t always accomplish. Over the years, Lena embarked on her own musical journey, singing in school and church. But, that desire to create was always poking up from under the surface. She began writing lyrics around age 8. But, it wasn’t until she was 14 that she started learning guitar so she could play Taylor Swift songs and capture a little bit of that singer-songwriter magic. In the summers of 2010 and 2011, Lena went out to L.A. to attend the Grammy songwriting and music camp. It was here her bourgeoning songwriting skills were put to the test. And maybe above all, allowed her to make those necessary connections and show her work to those who could do something about it. “I met this songwriter named Darrell Brown who wrote, ‘You’ll Think of Me’ by Keith Urban. He work shopped some of our stuff. I showed him my songs and he told me, ‘You’re writing country music. You got to move to Nashville’.” While this was the big push for her to move to Nashville at 18, country music wasn’t always at the forefront for Lena. Growing up, your first musical tastes and experiences are often shaped by your parents or the adults most active in your life. For Lena, that meant diving in headfirst to the singer-songwriters of the ‘70s. It was all about the storytellers -

and telling those stories well. “There’s a debate going on in country music right now about how to define ‘country’. And there is definitely shift in sound to be more ‘pop-like’. But, I think even though some artists’ songs have more pop sounds, they are still telling stories. And that isn’t necessarily happening in other genres,” Lena says. So, at 18, Lena moved to Nashville. In Nashville, there is a built-in culture of co-writing. You sit in a room for hours with the artist and emerge the other side with a song. But even with her experience and references, Lena was at a loss for how to break into that scene. So, she got an internship at a music publishing company to learn the ins and outs of the business. After some time, she was offered a publishing deal. This first gig allowed her to really delve into the world of songwriting from the ground up. While she was still trying to find her own voice as a young adult, she was working on songs for and with other artists and projects. This multifaceted view allowed Lena to look beyond the typical to find that something special. Writing for others allows Lena to get out of her own head and look at situations from a different perspective. “I especially love writing from the male point of view. Honestly, I feel girls are the best at writing songs for guys. Because sometimes it’s like, ‘I know you think that line is a compliment to the girl you would be singing this to, but she would see it as condescending. So, here’s how we can make something that she would want to here’,” she says. And this stems from a shortage of female artists and songwriters being lauded and showcased publicly. This led Lena to putting a focus back on her own personal work and what songs she would want to record and perform herself. That’s how her single, ‘Nervous’ came to fruition. “I wanted ‘Nervous’ to be my first single because it’s about the confident female. It flips the script a little bit, having the girl approach the guy and having the upper hand. There’s a real female empowerment in that, even if it isn’t outright saying it,” she says. For Lena, she didn’t realize the shortage of women in country music until she began

the pursuit herself. She quickly realized you could count the women releasing music and being played on the radio on one hand. As Lena shopped her songs around, she heard a familiar pattern. Executives loved her music and work, but they had always “just signed a girl”. Adding a female to your roster and taking a chance on her was to fill a quota, not for the pursuit of great music. “And while you had them not wanting to sign more females, they had 15 ‘bro-country’ artist all doing the same thing,” she says. While you will find encouragement and support from male counterparts once you get past the gatekeepers, the overall attitude is still engrained in the songwriting culture. This led Lena to help create Song Suffragettes in 2014 - an all-female singer-songwriter showcase held in Nashville on Monday nights. There’s comradery amongst the female singer-songwriters in Nashville as they know the best way to get their voices heard is to build each other up. “We wanted to show how many awesome female songwriters there are and be able to share their differing perspectives,” Lena says, “It’s not just, ‘She’s a female so she represents that half of the population.’” Over just a few short years, Song Suffragettes has grown from a small group to having over 200 unique female artists get up on present their music. Each week now sells out, highlighting people’s desire for more music written and performed by females. The consistent rotating cast of musicians has allowed for the community to become more tightknit. “I think there’s this expectation that because we’re all living in the same community and striving for the same thing, we should be competitive with each other and even catty. And the reality is so different. The more girl there are in country music, the better it is for all of us,” Lena says. The old guard is falling - that’s good. Lena Stone is proof. And while she is working on more of her own music to follow up ‘Nervous’, her dedication to bringing underserved female voices in country music to light cannot be emphasized enough. It’s not about ‘taking a chance’ on women. It’s about bringing the artists to the people and letting the music speak for itself. NKD NKDMAG.COM

malcolm kelley Words by OLIVIA SINGH Photos by CATHERINE POWELL

Malcolm Kelley is an L.A. native, born and raised on the West Coast and has had an interest in the entertainment industry from a young age. TV fanatics recognize him as the now-grown up Walt Lloyd from Lost and music fans know him as half of music duo MKTO. This month, Malcom dives back into his acting roots, starring in the big screen thriller Detroit. Malcolm grew up in Bellflower, California and his initial interest in acting began around the age of 5 or 6, after seeing commercials on TV. “I remember I first really got inspired just watching a McDonald’s commercial and [seeing] all the kids just having fun,” Malcolm recalls. “I just told my mom, ‘I want to do this. This looks fun’.” Slowly, he started auditioning for and booking roles in commercials, never thinking that he’d later make his way to the big screen. “Being a young kid, I didn’t know that this was something that could turn into a career or something that I could be doing for practically the rest of my life,” he says. “But at that age, I just knew that it looked like a great time and as I started getting

introduced to it and started booking more things, I just fell more in love with the whole process and everything about acting – and everything that came with it.” Commercials soon led to small roles on TV shows like For Your Love, Malcolm in the Middle and Girlfriends. With each role, Malcolm’s affinity for acting increased, especially after working with Denzel Washington in the 2002 movie Antwone Fisher. It was the first movie that Malcolm was a part of, and it remains one of the most impactful experiences of his acting journey. Two years after Antwone Fisher, he booked a role on ABC’s Lost. On the show, Malcolm played Walt Lloyd, one of the youngest survivors of the plane crash. “It was such a fun, lighthearted character with these special powers and really did put my career on a next level, and for people to be able to appreciate me for that makes me feel good to this day,” Malcolm says. Being a series regular on Lost and living in Hawaii for several months over the course of two years meant that Malcolm had to be homeschooled in order

to simultaneously pursue acting and his education. At that age, he realized that he wanted to continue acting for as long as possible. “That’s when I was really starting to understand that this could be a career for me and this is something that I really love to do,” Malcolm says. “At that point, I kind of had to make a decision with my career, just to keep going as strong as I needed to and give it the proper time that it needed. I made the decision to stay homeschooled and I don’t regret it.” Even though Malcolm has grown up since his time on Lost, people still recognize him from that role. “Sometimes I’ve done shows with my band and seeing people come with the Walt signs to the shows is just amazing,” he says. “To be able to know that people can share the love that they have for the acting and the music together, I think is something I’ve always wanted to get across. They break more barriers, to be able to give people the freedom to do multiple things.” When Malcolm booked a role on the 2010 TeenNick show Gigantic, he inadvertently found himself easing into the music industry with his co-star, NKDMAG.COM

danielle bradbery Words by SAMANTHA BAMBINO Photos by CATHERINE POWELL

superfruit Words by SHELBY CHARGIN Photos by CATHERINE POWELL

The expressive brainchild from inseparable best friends Mitch Grassi and Scott Hoying, Superfruit, is on the verge of releasing it’s second EP this month. The two vocalists started the project after their YouTube channel began growing past their expectations. Mitch and Scott wanted creative space in which they could push themselves past what their Grammy-winning band Pentatonix was doing, and work with young, hungry talent. “Actually, one of my friends from USC who is a producer, Ryan Robert Jones, we kind of just started writing songs with him for fun,” Scott recalls of Superfruit’s initial writing process. “We did like six or seven songs and were like, ‘This is so much fun.’ It felt so natural because we’ve been best friends since we were kids so we were really on the same page. We were able to communicate and write this music. And that’s when we really started getting into it.” However, getting into it wasn’t necessarily easy. “We kinda shelved

it for a while,” Mitch comments, “Because we had a whole world tour with Pentatonix that kind of took over our lives.” And while they love Pentatnoix, their creativity for something beyond the world-renowned a cappella group was growing. Their breaks were far and few between, but when they had them, Superfruit became priority. “It didn’t take that long honestly, it was like two months,” Mitch says of putting the first EP together. “Yeah, we just hit the ground running,” Scott confidently agrees. It was a bit of a process to really grasp what they were going for, but their first EP resonated with a lot of their young fans, and seemed to reach more people as time went on. “We’re frantically trying to do the second one,” Mitch laughs. It’s a frantic dash before they head out on their next Pentatonix venture, and it’s also a challenge because they want to make this second EP even better than the first and want to continue growing Superfruit’s fanbase within and outside Pentatonix NKDMAG.COM

savannah outen Words by ELIZABETH FORREST Photos by CATHERINE POWELL

YouTube star and singer-songwriter Savannah Outen began writing songs at 2-years-old. “The first song I wrote was about shaking my hiney,” she remembers. Writing wasn’t her only talent as a child; she was also a serious dancer and, as she grew older, it became clear that singing was her destiny. When on road trips, she would harmonize to the radio and leave her parents questioning where her talent came from. She couldn’t come up with an easy answer to their question, though. It just came to her. Her passion for writing and singing never died. Growing up, Savannah’s mom took her to concerts with her. That’s where her hunger to perform began to grow. “I would always get kind of sad going to concerts because I wanted to be on stage,” Savannah explains. At age 13, she finally decided get serious and pursue a career in music. Although she wasn’t sure of the next step, her parents were hesitantly supportive. It wasn’t until after winning second place at a Los Angeles music competition and getting to meet with members of the music industry

that they realized her career in music was a real possibility. Savannah’s parents were actually the ones to encourage Savannah to begin posting to YouTube. At first, she resisted their suggestion. “I was terrified because I didn’t want my friends to know that I sang. Nobody knew,” she admits. It was impossible to keep her channel a secret, though. Her YouTube covers became so popular that she was given the chance to work with Radio Disney. She found success there; the first original song Savannah ever wrote on her guitar actually got to No. 5 on the station. Then she was able to tour and perform. To this day, she still remembers her performance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade at this time as one of her favorite and most memorable. Although YouTube has been great to Savannah, VidCon was where Savannah remembers first thinking to herself that she wanted to do more with her music career. “I was like ‘Wow, why am I just releasing covers?’” Savannah remembers. After writing for her whole life, she realized that

writing music was her favorite thing to do and meant everything to her. And then after a bit of difficulty finding the correct team, Savannah finally had the opportunity to get more serious into producing her own original music. “I’m still going to do covers. I went six months without when I was in the studio doing doubles a day and people got so mad,” Savannah laughs. That doesn’t take away from her excitement about her new music. She loves the direction it’s going, particularly her newest single “Coins”. Her new music has a different sound than what she out out before, which was straight pop. She was nervous about how the change would be received by fans, but they’re supportive, completely on board and can’t wait for more. That comes as a relief since Savannah’s fans and their opinions mean so much to her. Because she began her career on YouTube, her connection to fans is deeper than many artists that come from a more traditional route. “I see some of them on Instagram and they have boyfriends now and it’s just so cute to see that they’ve totally NKDMAG.COM

lindsay arnold Words by VANESSA SALLES Photos by CATHERINE POWELL Hair & Make-Up by EVA NOTIS

jillian jacqueline

Words & Photos by CATHERINE POWELL Location: THE THOMPSON HOTEL

Jillian Jacqueline has been making the rounds in Nashville for years, but after signing to Big Loud Records last fall and releasing her first single “Reasons” through them in April, she’s finally on an uphill drive. Jillian started singing when she was just 7-years-old, and because her mom was a big fan of country music, that’s all Jillian listened to as a kid.

Theatre. After the initial run, the show went on tour for five years. “I played the same part from ages 9 to 15. Same dress,” she laughs. The Kenny Rogers tour only occupied her time during Christmas months, so during the year Jillian performed with her sisters in a family band. They all learned different instruments and performed at fairs and festivals around the area.

showing up”. She got a waitressing job and started going to shows to network. It took over four years for her to sign a publishing deal, but once she did, she already had 400 songs under her belt. “I honestly did feel like I had a lot to say,” Jillian says, “There was a lot of built up emotions. One of the first songs I ever wrote was called ‘Hurricane’ about my parents’ divorce.”

“As a female, I really had avoided for a long time writing about relationships. Not super intentionally, but just trying to say things that haven’t been said.” After her mom heard her singing in the car, she started taking Jillian to open mic nights around town, and when Jillian was 9, she auditioned to be apart of Kenny Rogers’ Christmas show. Even after what she describes as a “traumatic” audition, Jillian booked the part and relocated from Pennsylvania to New York City for three months to be in the show, which was stationed at the Beacon

The sisters tried to make a dent in the New York City music scene, but nothing was coming to fruition. So when she was 16, Jillian quit the band in an effort to have a more normal life. She finished high school and went off to college, all while her sisters were signing a record deal with Sony in Nashville. In 2010, Jillian joined her sisters in Nashville, but felt like “the ugly duckling just

She started to build an identity with songwriting. She wrote a song called “Sad Girls” and started playing it around town, and it was the first song strangers were approaching her about after shows, which made her feel like she was on the right track. She was advised by a lot of people not to sign a record deal and just do things herself, but when Big Loud came around, she felt like they really

NKDMAG.COM

CANDICE PATTON Words by STACY MAGALLON Photos by CATHERINE POWELL Styling by APUJE KALU Hair by ALEXANDER ARMOND Make-Up by MELANESIA HUNTER

emily warren Words & Photos by CATHERINE POWELL You may think you’re not familiar with Emily Warren, but you’re probably wrong. The New York City born songwriter has an impressive resume under her belt – most notably The Chainsmokers’ Grammy-winning hit, “Don’t Let Me Down”, and most recently, two song of summer contenders: Dua Lipa’s “New Rules” and Charli XCX’s “Boys”. And while songwriting is still her passion, she is currently transitioning into her own artist – something she’s wanted to be for years. Growing up, Emily attended Trinity, an academically rigorous K-12 school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. In school, Emily never felt like she was being encouraged to be creative, but at home, her parents always pushed her to be. She started a band in high school and played around the city, but the band split up when Emily went to college. Most of the guys ended up in the indie-pop band MisterWives, and Emily headed south down the island to NYU’s Clive Davis school. At NYU, she was encouraged to be a writer but wasn’t super set on the idea until she ended up in a session with Scott Harris, who is now her most frequent collaborator. And so began her career. “I was saying for a long time that I didn’t want to be an artist, because it was helping me getting in the room with other artists,” she says, “And, to be honest, I needed the time to figure out what my story was.” She spent the last three years developing her songwriting, and in turn developed herself as an artist. In 2016, she was featured on Frenship’s global smash “Capsize” – a song she had written a while ago and the band opted to leave her vocals on. The song took off on Spotify, which gave Emily the confidence to be able to just put out a song and letting it 44

live. Around the same time, “Don’t Let Me Down” came out and solidified both Emily’s and The Chainsmokers’ place in pop music. When it came time for the DJ duo to put their record together, they wanted to use a few songs Emily had written and had shopped around different features for them, but ultimately decided to keep Emily on most of them – some with credit, some as a secret. Following the release of the album, Emily joined the group on Saturday Night Live and then on their massive summer tour. “They hadn’t really see me perform ever, and suddenly it was this whole tour,” she says, noting that she appreciates how much they trusted her abilities. Immediately after “Capsize” and “Don’t Let Me Down” started to find success, Emily noticed a distinct change in how many people were trying to get in the room with her. “At the time it was causing me a lot of anxiety and I was having panic attacks, just because it’s weird when you feel like the exact same person but people aren’t really treating you the same,” she says. Another reoccurring situation she found herself in was artists and labels expecting her to write “Don’t Let Me Down” – Part II, which she found frustrating. “It’s not going to happen again,” she laughs, “I wish I knew [why people latched onto it] so I could recreate it.” “I get so much joy out of helping people figure out their story,” Emily says of writing with other artists. But she’s also really enjoying the creative freedom of writing for her own project. She’s currently putting together an album of songs that she feels best represent who she is as her own artist, and a handful of the songs she’s been sitting on for a while. But “Hurt By

You”, the first single she released, felt like the right introduction. “’Hurt By You’ was kind of the no brainer because deep down it’s a pop song, but the production and the little Motown thing at the end of the chorus was kind of a nod, for me, to all the music I grew up listening to,” she says. The second single, “Something to Hold on To” was released in July, and was written with her boyfriend – who is also producing part of her record. She wrote it when “Don’t Let Me Down” was at its peak, and she was feeling all that anxiety. “For me, he’s someone that cared about me before all of that, and then watching him kind of hurt himself for me was too much at the time,” she says of the song’s meaning. They shot the video in her parents’ house in Connecticut, where she wrote the song, and her boyfriend is in it, which was an incredibly cool experience for her. Emily is part of a new wave of pop females who are being appreciated as artists and writing their own songs. Singers like Julia Michaels, Bebe Rexha and Phoebe Ryan all came up as songwriters before being embraced as artists. “It’s so cool now that people are aware that other people are writing songs and really want to know about it,” she says, “To me it’s super reminiscent of the ‘60s.” She finds it interesting to see which songs writers choose to be their own songs, and how they choose to define their story. Looking back at the last two years, Emily has trouble picking a standout moment – though the tour as a whole was huge for her. But putting out her first solo song was incredibly humbling for her, and watching all the artists she’s worked with post about it without being asked meant a lot to her. “Every day is crazier than the last,” she says. NKD

charlie worsham Words by ELIZABETH FORREST Photos by CATHERINE POWELL

Mississippi-born singer-songwriter Charlie Worsham’s earliest memories are of tagging along to music gigs with his dad. Because his father was the drummer, Charlie would sit in his lap during sound check and pretend he was, too. The single moment of clarity that solidified Charlie’s journey into music was when the band’s guitarist played the solo for “Werewolves of London” with his teeth. “I thought, ‘Man, I kind of think I have to this for the rest of my life’,“ Charlie remembers. As he grew older, he took piano and banjo lessons, played at bars, went to college for music and joined a Nashville-based band. Six years ago, after parting ways with the band, he began his own solo career. He released his first album, Rubber Band, in 2013, but hit a brick wall and felt burnt out once he began to write for his sophomore album. Because of this, he had to recommit himself to finding out what it was that originally made him fall head over heels for music. Luckily, he found it. “Music is such a pure thing,” he explains. “What it really took was giving myself permission to make music for me and not really care

if it made anyone else happy.” By making himself happy, he found that everyone else got what they needed in the end. A self-proclaimed people pleaser, Charlie fell into into the habit of feeling as though he needed permission and approval for everything. The switch in the changing music industry was partly to blame; whereas before it was just about the music, suddenly it was more than writing songs. “It was social media and getting that right, it was images, you need to have a song for the radio, a song for this, and that had never been part of it until that chapter,” he says. It was overwhelming and disheartening, so he needed to make a change. One change that got him back into writing was carrying around a notebook and filling a page of it every day. “My one rule was to tell the truth,” he says. His sophomore album, Beginning of Things, began in that notebook. Every three weeks, he would bring in his songs and perform them for his A&R representative and producer until they finally decided upon an album. It was a big change; Charlie’s first album was recorded over two and a half years in small

batches, but Beginning of Things was essentially recorded in six days. The difference is evident. Frank Ladell, Charlie’s producer, once told him,”records are photographs of an artist at a point in time.” Rubber Band was an accurate portrait of Charlie in his mid to late twenties, but Beginning of Things is a more accurate picture of him as he’s grown older. Charlie cites his upbringing as a strong album influence. “I grew up in one of the richest places for music on the planet. I grew up in northern Mississippi,” he says. From the same area as legends such as Elvis Presley and Tammy Wynette, Charlie believes that he put elements into his record that others simply couldn’t. In Beginning of Things, he explores bluegrass, hard country, rock and roll and even “really funky stuff.” Though his current single “Cut Your Groove” actually hits close to his debut album in relation to sound, Charlie promises that it’s his boldest and most honest album to date. Romantically speaking, the album’s most honest song is “Old Time’s Sake”. In it, he sings of meeting someone and having an honest conversation and real NKDMAG.COM

SAN DIEGO COMIC CON class of 2017 Photographed & Interviewed by CATHERINE POWELL

David Anders

Gabrielle Anwar

KJ Apa

iZombie “I feel like we’ve got it down to a science as a crew, so it becomes easier and easier and people know us more. But even on the street people [recognize me] from iZombie.”

Once Upon a Time “My favorite part has been how welcoming everyone is. It’s quite hard to step into a show when it’s so well established and not feel like a total loser, so that’s been great.”

Riverdale “I hope we can work on that dynamic [between Archie and his mom] because I think it’d be interesting to see.”

Asha Broomfield

Robert Buckley

Robert Carlyle

Riverdale “We’re learning together. It’s this weird, amazing, self-love process with our audience.”

iZombie “There’s a brain I’m really excited for this season. So long as I do my job and it works right, it has the potential to be like, Teenage Girl Brain level.”

Once Upon a Time “They said ‘Action!’ and [Emilie de Raven and I] did the dance and there was a natural end in the music, and everyone [in the room] had gone. It was just us in the moment.”

Charlie Carver

Casey Cott

Damon Dayoub

Teen Wolf “I think it’s really nice to have closure and to put some punctuation on something, just because you can appreciate what it was as a part of your life.”

Riverdale “I think Season 2 we really dive into the insecurities behind [Kevin’s] humorous outbursts. Kind of the dark side of Kevin.”

Stitchers “It makes it easier when you’ve been together so long, and you just joke and play with each other, and it’s an interesting time always.”