For Kali Fontecchio, it was always going to be animation or music. But over time, she’s found a way to do both—even in the same project. Though she started drawing at three and has always loved cartoons, her youthful dream was to be a rock star. Her musician father introduced her to Bob Dylan and taught her how to play one chord a week on the guitar. Once she got the hang of playing, she started writing her own music and even formed a band with a few high school friends. In her first moment of combining multiple pop culture interests, they performed from the Silent Hill 3 soundtrack at her school talent show.
Fontecchio pursued music even as she began attending Otis College of Art & Design for Digital Media. She played shows and worked at all-ages venue The Smell in her spare time. When her prized Les Paul electric guitar was stolen—one her father had bought from a friend the day she was born and given to her when she was finally “ready”—and she couldn’t afford to replace it, she shifted to acoustic. With Katie Rice, who would later become a fellow TAG member, she released a set of country covers as Kot’n Katie & Kali Kazoo on MySpace and then Bandcamp. She also turned her focus on her art school assignments, and after she graduated, she built an animation career as a jack of all trades; although her specialty is character design, she has done everything from boards and color design to art directing and directing on shows ranging from Jellystone to SpongeBob SquarePants.
In a stroke of multi-hyphenate fortune, in 2010 she met some artists from the Channel 101 short film festival. They were also in the L.A. indie music scene, and they encouraged her to get back into performing. Steadily, she began releasing her own songs, keeping the Kali Kazoo moniker, a remnant of her pop culture blogging past—it’s a reference to a Neutral Milk Hotel lyric.
Fontecchio has released four full-length albums so far. The first one, Outlaw Engineer Painted Pioneer, is a folksy singer-songwriter album with clever lyrics and softly strummed guitar and banjo. She credits her 2013 sound to her love of Neutral Milk Hotel and Bob Dylan, as well as to having no money and no band. But as she met more musicians who wanted to work with her—many of them also animation workers with simultaneous careers in music—her sound changed and evolved. Her sophomore album has a post-punk darkness to it, her third gets even grungier, and her more recent release, Long Live the Loser, has an indie alt-rock sound that’s as uniquely hers as her seafoam green aesthetic.
That this album’s sound is as distinctive as Fontecchio’s art—retro-inspired with a Californian pastel color palette—is no coincidence. As more musicians began recording with her, she had to learn how to make sure her voice and taste still shone through. She loves collaborating, but she still views “Kali Kazoo” as a solo artist, so the process is ultimately about supplementing her vision. “It’s like I’m art directing the music,” she says.
In that way, music provides the opportunity for even more vulnerability as an artist. When she’s designing a character or directing a scene, Fontecchio can hide behind the anonymity of animation. No one assumes the cartoons she works on are about her. But when she performs as Kali Kazoo, she’s singing right to her audience. As a naturally shy person, she struggles with that, but still leans into emotional honesty as much as she can in her music. Long Live the Loser dives deep into grief and frustration stemming from the pandemic, heartbreak, the state of the industry and the world, and the death of her mother. In it, she explores how to cope with periods when you feel like you just can’t win. “You know what, I’m just gonna embrace it and be the best loser,” she says.
Long Live the Loser was the longest Fontecchio spent working on one album, partially because of that level of vulnerability, but also because the further she’s gotten in both careers, the busier life has become. She laughs when she remembers how as a kid she used to overanalyze the length of time between bands’ releases: “Now it makes sense!” When she finds herself working on a musical project and an animation project simultaneously, she prefers to work on one until she burns out and then switch to the other. In doing so, she often finds new inspiration.
But Fontecchio hopes the walls between her music career and animation career will soon fade. She just finished creating and directing a short for Cartoon Cartoon called Maude Macher & Dom Duck, a musical featuring songs she wrote and scored with help from her long-time friend and collaborator, Composer Tommy Meehan, who produced her first full-length album. One day, she’d love to do a whole show with her own music. Her ideal would be an animated variety series, filled with talk show segments, comedic shorts, and live music performances. “I love performing, I love singing, I love songwriting, and I love designing,” she says. Most of all, she loves tying it all together.
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