INTERVIEW: Mi-kaisha on new single 'Lean On You': "It feels like a really exciting, fun, experimental phase of my career where I can pull from all the different genres I grew up listening to"
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 10 June 2025
Proud Darumbal and Tongan woman Mi-kaisha first released her beguiling R&B-soul-pop music in 2019 and has established herself as one of Australia’s brightest young musicians, highlighted by her performance with Jessica Mauboy, Julian Hamilton and 3% at last year’s ARIA Awards.
She has recently released her new single ‘Lean On You’, her first new music of 2025. Produced by Billy Davis (Wafia, Jessica Mauboy, 3%, Ruel, Noname, Anderson .Paak), the song is a gorgeous gospel infused pop-R&B mix with a delicate emotional touch from Mi-kaisha’s vocal. The song was born out of her experience living and studying in New York at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, where she was the first ever Aboriginal student accepted into the course. ‘I’m losing innocence while finding me / I’m going crazy, lost in the maybes / Too many possibilities…in all my highs and lows I’ll lean on you,’ she sings.
“I wrote ‘Lean On You’ while living in NYC away from family, my community and ultimately everything familiar to me,” Mi-kaisha says. “This song was a dedication to the people in my life who had sacrificed so much for me, who had brought so much joy into my life and ultimately who I knew I could always lean on.”
A truly captivating artist, Mi-kaisha’s music mixes vulnerability with empowerment and her remarkable vocals, supported by a soundscape that is intriguingly multi-layered without ever feeling cluttered, are honey smooth, mesmerising and inviting. This new era of her music has opened powerfully with ‘Lean On You’ and Women In Pop recently caught up with Mi-kaisha to chat all about her music.
Hi Mi-kaisha! Congratulations on ‘Lean On You’, what a beautiful song. I know that you were in New York when this one came about, can you talk to me where you're were at, emotionally and sonically, when you created this beauty?
Thank you! I feel like for maybe the past two years of my career, it has been just throwing paint at the wall season for me. It feels like a really exciting, fun, experimental phase of my career where I can pull from all the different genres I grew up listening to, collaborate with people that maybe I wouldn't think to collaborate with, and basically just create a bunch of work that reflects different parts of me. At the heart of me, I'm a pop R&B girlie, but there's a world of music out there that has informed what I do.
I actually wrote ‘Lean On You’ while in LA with a gospel, more Afro beats inclined producer and songwriter, and it felt like a world that was completely out of my depths. That was what excited me so much about collaborating with him, and that's where this song came from. We shared that space and that love of harmony and of vocals, and so that's where we connected. We each brought our own unique background, our own unique stories, and that's how ‘Lean On You’ was born.
Beautiful. You said that you are a pop R&B girl at heart, and this was your exploration into pushing yourself into going ‘what can I do?’ Do you feel within the industry, particularly for independent artists, that there's still this pigeon holing that happens, there's a fear of we can't try anything new. Do you feel like it's an external factor, or does some of that pressure also come from yourself?
I can only speak from my experience, and also the context of me having become an adult while living in New York while I was studying. I feel like there's a pressure to stay in your lane and stick to what you do best, to not experiment, to not try new things, and to not step into a space that maybe you're not qualified to be in, so to speak. If anything, these last two years has been a stretch for me, it's been a challenge to myself to step out of my comfort zone. It's been exciting, but also kind of freeing, in a way, to just know that at the end of the day, I'm a songwriter, I'm a storyteller, and whatever genre or form that takes, it doesn't matter, as long as I'm being true to the story and ultimately continuing to create, whatever shape or form that takes. That’s all that really matters.
I love that. With ‘Lean On You’, the sound of it and the warmth in your voice, there's something very grounded, about it. Talk to me a little bit about the inspiration behind it and the people you're singing to.
Since I was very young, I had a dream to study in New York City, and when I was 18, that dream came true, thanks to a lot of people in my community and my family who really sacrificed quite a lot in order to help me go over. Whether financially, or their time, the encouragement that they gave me, or just being solid, consistent people in my life. I felt like I had a responsibility to write a song and to give music back to them, ultimately, the only way I could. A lot of the music I wrote around this time was about my family and about my community and a thank you to them, or a reminder to myself of how important those people in my life are. I wrote this quite a few years ago now, and I just re-recorded the vocals this year, so it's almost like a collaboration with my current and my past self, which is really fun to think about. A probably less confident, maybe a little bit more insecure, version of Mi-kaisha wrote this song, and then current Mi-kaisha, still growing, still finding my way, but definitely a lot more confident in life, recorded it and was able to tell this story in a new way, with a fresh lens.
The core of the story remains true to me, now living back in Sydney with all of my community, with all of my family, it's just a reminder that no matter where you are, no matter what season of life you're in, those people are what matters most in life.
You've spoken before about the tension between fragility and strength, and the perspective that we have on vulnerability, particularly as women, vulnerability is seen as a weakness. ‘Lean On You’ feels very like the embodiment of fragility and strength, and I'm curious, not just with ‘Lean On You’, but with the songs that you're writing going forward, how do you walk that line as a songwriter, that dance between fragility and strength?
That is a super tough question to answer, but I love it. The best thing about having the opportunity to speak with people about my music is I'm forced to really think about and contemplate my music and my craft in a way that maybe I wouldn't have independently. My instinct, my gut feeling, is that songwriting is inherently vulnerable. Whenever you step into a room, particularly with a stranger, which is what you often do as a songwriter, there's this very fine line and this balance of being vulnerable and pouring out your heart and your being and the essence of who you are to the stranger, while also bringing a strength with it. It's not trauma dumping, it's not ‘here have all my stuff and let's try and make a song out of it.’ It's more here's all of the stuff that I carry with me, how can we craft it or create a puzzle together in a way that is hopeful.
At the end of the day, I want my music to be uplifting. I want my music to speak life into people. I want to I want my music to bring joy. I want it to bring vulnerability. That doesn't mean it's always going to be positive, but like you said, it's this balance between bearing your soul to the world, and then also bringing this strength along with that. I don't know if we ever really find the answer. Sometimes you lean one way more than the other, and then you have to bring yourself back to the centre. And then maybe the other time you lean too much into vulnerability, and you have to kind of pull it back a little bit. So it's a constant balance, it's a constant dance.
Speaking of vulnerability, and also growth, you recently stood in front of 21,000 plus people at the Indigenous All Stars half time show - in a very, very beautiful feathered jumpsuit, by the way. This was a huge arena and yet your voice still hit the big notes but also the intimacy. How do you keep that emotional core alive when your stage gets that huge? How does the intimacy stay there when the stage is so epic?
I mean, the adrenaline is kind of next level in those situations. Obviously I care so much, and so deeply about what I do, so the anxiety is high, the adrenaline is high, the care factor is even higher and so often before those shows, I just go really quiet. I have to go inwards. I surround myself with people who I trust and who I care about and who I know care about me. I had two of my best friends, Gloria and Steph, with me doing backing vocals on that show, and they carried me through that honestly. Again, a testament to the people that you have in your life around you - your village, your crew, your community. I really do lean on those people in those moments, and as a result, the second I get up there, the anxiety subsides. I forget that I'm standing in front of 21,000 people, and I just get to do what I believe I was born to do, which is storytell, and hopefully give someone a piece of my story, or a glimpse of joy, or, maybe they just leave feeling differently or thinking differently. But that’s where I go, I just go inside, I go to my people, I find my crew, and just kind of hold tight.
A lot of people, I imagine go into this career and they have the stage in their eye, but you refer a lot to the storytelling. Was it songwriting for you first, and as a result was it quite nerve wracking to get yourself from the page to the stage?
It's actually quite the opposite, I grew up singing. I was very shy as a kid, but I grew up in a family that loves music, and every chance that they got, I was up there singing some kind of cover for them at a family barbecue, as much as I hated it and I wanted to just shrivel up and hide in the corner. My family just loved to hear me sing, and so I grew up performing everywhere. I would do talent shows, I would do singing nights, literally everywhere I was performing. It wasn't until I got into my late teens that I really wanted to turn to songwriting as a focus. I still feel like I'm in a season right now where that is really my core focus.
Because I grew up performing, that really does feel like second nature to me now, it feels like muscle memory. As nerve wracking as it is, I've done my 10,000 hours, that's like my bread and butter. Songwriting and storytelling really feels like a place that pushes me to do things that have challenged me a bit more. Songwriting is such a different world and such a different creative muscle to use and I still feel like I'm building that strength and skill in that area. I guess that’s why I'm so compelled by that space, and I'm so excited by it because I still feel like there's so much growth for me in that area.
I love that. I think whenever you jump ship into another realm, and particularly as women, you never lose that sense of imposter syndrome, and I imagine when you're in these beautiful writing sessions, you're like, ‘No, I'm not really a writer.’ I’m curious to know if you so have those momentary anxieties of ‘no, no, I don't do this, this is not my thing.’
Absolutely! I hope there's a day where it goes away. I don't want to say imposter syndrome, but the anxiety level is high when I'm in those rooms and I'm like, what am I even doing here? Whose idea was this? And then I have to remind myself it was actually mine. It's part of the battle of being an artist, isn't it? It's this constant tightrope of caring and pouring your heart and soul into something, but then also not letting it break you at the same time. Songwriting is one of those tough spaces where you have to just literally bear your soul. I'm hoping it'll get better with time, but who even knows?
As you navigate your way around the industry, how have you found the Australian pop and particularly pop R&B representation is going? Do you think it's better? Because there was a long time in Australia where it just felt like there was no room, and some of our greatest artists had to leave the country to get heard.
There’s a part of me that is optimistic and can see the transformation that the industry has undertaken over the past 10 years. And then there's another part of me that still thinks we can do so much better, and that we've only taken a very small step in the right direction. I'm constantly balancing these two parts of myself and my brain of appreciating and being grateful for the progress that has been made, but then also having a hunger for more. I think we can always do better, and in some ways, the way that the music industry was set up is inherently exploitative and exclusive to certain groups of people or certain demographics. And so I think it's a bit of both, appreciating and having a moment of gratitude and it's not all doom and gloom, but then also that fire in my stomach to go: we can do better. How can we get more women in executive positions. How can we get more women in engineering and behind the scenes?
I believe that every artist in the industry has a responsibility to hold space for other demographics, or for other voices or different communities to also have space. I'm a firm believer that artists are inherently activists, depending on what kind of artist you are.
100%, but I always feel for people when they're expected to know the parliament inside and out and change the industry, and be this powerful activist.
Absolutely, and to be honest, I probably don't know the parliament inside and out! But I can definitely try my best to have a hot crack at encouraging people to stream Australian music, support local artists, create space for more female songwriters, execs, engineers, to be in the industry. We all do it in our own way. Creating and being an artist in itself is a form of protest, and just to choose that creative path is already a bold move to make.
You've have got a kick ass headline show coming up at Bondi Pavilion, which is very cool. Can I ask you what has been like one of your biggest pinch me moments in your career so far?
Honestly, I think the first ever pinch me moment to this day is probably still my biggest pinch me moment, and that was when I was ten or eleven years old, recording the vocals on The Sapphires for the young Sapphires in the film. I got to spend a week in the studio with Jess Mauboy, Mahalia Barnes and just a ton of powerhouse female vocalists. And to this day, I look back on that week as one of the most exciting, mind blowing pinch me weeks of my life!
Oh, that makes me really happy! That's such a lovely one. Is there a new sound that listeners are going to be hearing, possibly at Bondi, or possibly a new a new shade or a new genre that you're looking forward to stepping into?
Yes, I'm in the early stages of planning the show right now, and it's just going to be the most chaotic, cathartic, beautiful, staunch, soft amalgamation of who I am in the most Mi-kaisha way possible. So I'm just so excited to just get stuck into it and have free rein to do whatever I want creatively, sonically, aesthetically. It's just going to be so much fun and I can't wait.
‘Lean On You’ is out now. You can download and stream here.
Follow Mi-kaisha on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.
Mi-kaisha is performing at Bondi Pavilion on 5 July. Tickets on sale now.
