Taking It Back: Kyle Motsinger on Self-Doubt, Tori Amos, and His Most Personal Album Yet

Kyle Motzinger has spent four years making his third album. It shows, in the best possible way.

The New York City-based singer-songwriter, praised by Buzz Music L.A. as an artist who “transcends the barriers of genre and style,” releases Take It Back today, a record he describes as a journey from self-doubt to confidence. It is, by his own account, the most honest thing he has ever made.

Growing up in a town of five hundred people near Peoria, Illinois, roughly halfway between Chicago and St. Louis, Motsinger was surrounded by cornfields and a broad mix of musical influences. His household was tuned to adult contemporary radio, k.d. lang and No Doubt rubbing shoulders with Paula Cole, before the pop explosion of Britney and NSYNC captured his attention entirely. But running alongside all of it was a quieter obsession: musical theater.

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“I had a bunch of styles of music sort of jangling around my brain,” he says. “Musicals are in my background. I was doing community theater and starting to discover that music.”

He began playing piano in eighth grade, plunking out small musical themes on the electric keyboard his parents bought him. Formal songwriting, though, came much later. A high school talent show produced a song called Ghosts from the Past, dramatic and foreboding even then. “I don’t know what past mistakes I had at that age,” he laughs. “But of course we know now, little boy had lots of feelings. At the time I wasn’t out, but I was very much drawn to more dramatic storytelling.”

It wasn’t until around 2014 or 2015 that something unlocked. The catalyst, perhaps unexpectedly, was Tori Amos.

“People are probably sick of me talking about her,” he admits. “But an ex of mine introduced me to all of her music. We would listen to a different Tori album every night until we got through all of them. And something, some sort of light switched on. She really deals with what she’s going through, especially in those early albums. And I hadn’t really dealt with my past. The best way I could do that was to write songs about myself, how I was feeling, what I was going through.”

The floodgates, as he puts it, opened. He wrote furiously, and in 2015 performed an entire night of original music upstairs at the Duplex cabaret in New York. “The feeling of performing in front of that crowd and feeling sort of like a rock star at the piano, it was like, well, this is what I’m meant to be doing.”

This was a pivot point. Motsinger had done years in theater by then, including an off-Broadway children’s musical called Fancy Nancy after he moved to New York. Things had been starting to go well. But he made a deliberate choice.

“I’m a ginger. Back then I had hair on top, no beard, but I had a very specific look, still do. And I felt like, if I write my music, I know that I’m right for the role of me. I don’t have to worry about being cast. I can just write for myself and create my own art.”

His first album grew from those early sessions, opening with the single Midwest Boy. A second followed in 2020, released into the silence of a pandemic with almost no way to promote it.

“I sort of felt a frustration of, I don’t know that people really listened to the second album as much as I wanted them to. I have people I know in real life who I feel like don’t even know that I’m a singer-songwriter, because it’s really hard with social media and the algorithms. So I was feeling very frustrated and doubting myself, like, okay, maybe I’m just not good at this.”

That doubt became the seed of Take It Back. “I thought, I want to write about my frustrations, my self-doubt, and also what was going on with the world at the time, and what is sadly still going on. And suddenly it was like, okay, this is what this album is going to be. A journey from self-doubt to confidence.”

The album is, he says, emotionally raw in the truest sense. Down Down Down, which appears on the record, charts the lowest of lows. The Imposter tackles imposter syndrome head-on. Sabotage examines the ways we undermine ourselves. “Some people aren’t willing to talk about when they’re down like that. I feel like people need to hear that they’re not alone.”

And yet the album ends not with a wail but a whisper. The title track closes things out with what Motzinger calls “a quiet resolve.” “It may sound sonically like a sad ballad, and it maybe starts that way, but there’s a resolve at the end of, I’m gonna take my power back. It’s not a loud declaration. It’s just, I’m going to let this go and I’m going to trust that I’m good enough. And I think that can be just as powerful.”

Sonically, Take It Back represents a shift. Where his second album leaned into pop, this one reaches back toward nineties alt rock. It is also, pointedly, a record made with real musicians.

“I don’t think you can replace real musicians easily,” he says. “I had a fellow singer-songwriter ask me, why do you hire live string players? You could have just done that on a synthesizer. And I said, sure, but there’s something about a real musician and the way a bow comes across the strings that you just can’t replicate easily.”

Not everyone recorded in the same room. The brass player on opening track Let’s Try This Again sent his parts over remotely, as did other contributors found through the platform soundbetter.com, which Motzinger recommends enthusiastically to independent artists. Most of the strings were arranged by Mark Hartman and recorded in the studio, but the closing track’s haunting cello came from an unexpected place.

“I asked a player I found online to do one cello line on the song. He ended up giving me a cello trio that sounded stunning. What I would encourage other songwriters to do is let go enough to let another musician see what they can add without being super in control. Some really magical stuff can happen.”

When he is not writing or recording, Motsinger can be found at Marie’s Crisis, the legendary West Village bar and the world’s only acoustic sing-along show tunes venue. “I don’t really want to call it a survival job because it’s more than survival. I get to use my BFA musical theater degree. I get to sing musical theater songs.” Recent solo turns have included Why God Why from Miss Saigon and Fabulous from A New Brain, a show he loves.

On the subject of Broadway, he has firm opinions. He was captivated by The Lost Boys (“it sort of broke the vampire musical curse”) and calls Ragtime essential viewing for the current moment.

As for what comes next, Motsinger is, for once, content not to know. He sees Take It Back as the final chapter of a trilogy, three albums that collectively map his journey toward self-knowledge. “I feel like at the end of this album we’re at a button for now. I wonder if there’s not something lighter to talk about coming ahead. A lot of my contemporary queer musicians are talking about love, sex and whatnot. And one of the songs on this album is about maybe being ready to date again. So I don’t know. I have things I might want to talk about. I just don’t know when.”

Four years is a long time to make a record. He wants to live a little life first.

Take It Back by Kyle Motsinger is out now on Apple Music, Spotify, and all digital platforms.

Listen our full interview on the Bear World Podcast here or using the player below.