Kina Grannis is an American guitarist and singer-songwriter from Orange County, CA. She started performing in 2001 after getting over with her shyness. Kina independently released her first full-length album, Stairwells, on February 23, 2010. Her music is both sweet and melancholy, but always filled with hope.
Kina started playing shows at the age of four in front of her stuffed animals. Now she plays in front of people, though it wasn’t the quickest transition for the admittedly shy songstress. While attending college at USC, Kina often retreated to the secluded stairwells around campus where she could write and sing without being heard. Protected by their quiet confines, she found a safe haven and a creative outlet for her music. Armed with a guitar and a cup of tea, Kina wrote in every stairwell she came across. And it was within these stairwells that she developed her confidence as a songwriter and her poise as a performer.
In 2007, Kina joined YouTube, made a music video and entered herself into a contest. A few months later, her video for “Message From Your Heart” aired during the Superbowl and its 97 million viewers (or 194 million eyeballs, depending on how you’re keeping track) and she walked away with a record deal. Since then, Kina has regularly posted her songs on YouTube, amassing many millions of views, and toured throughout North America. Her songs have been heard on television shows such as ABC’s General Hospital and MTV’s College Life.
In 2012, Kina founded Run Team Kina, a two-pronged effort to promote health and fitness as well as raise funds for The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (in honor of her mother who was diagnosed with a rare blood disease when Kina was in high school). Run Team Kina raised $72,000 for cancer research and mobilized hundreds of fans around the world to train for races and work towards personal health goals.
Kina's most recent work, the Jakarta EP (released in 2016), came as a result of a harrowing experience in which she and her band were detained in Indonesia for 100 days, facing potential jail time due to a promoter's failure to secure proper work visas. In these songs she reflects upon missing home and loved ones and finding gratitude in the midst of difficult times.
Kina strives for honesty and intimacy in the songs she writes. She writes to document her life, to process her struggles and fears, to stay sane, to feel, and most importantly, to connect with people around the world. She's continuously in a dialogue with her community of supporters, and together they have formed quite the online family.
In 2017, Kina took that relationship one step further, creating one of the first fan-supported record labels through the creator-funding site Patreon. KG Records, (named in an online vote by members of the label) is currently supporting the release of Kina's next album, expected in the spring of 2018.
