Kayla Marque Is Still Brewing Magic

“I’m from the future,” says Kayla Marque, a sly smile crossing her face. “But Denver is my mothership.”

There is something intrinsically mystical about the singer’s presence – anyone who has seen her perform can testify to that. Her music, which she labels as “sparkly dark ritual pop,” is its own form of soothing magic, and that’s exactly the result Marque wants. “This music, for me, is medicine,” she says, “and I intend to be a catalyst for other people’s awakenings, which in the end is healing.”

Marque knows the healing power of music. Her prowess with that power is redolent on her latest album, Midheaven, which dropped on all streaming platforms in August and is her first release since 2020’s Brain Chemistry project, which included two albums, Left Brain and Right Brain. But while Midheaven is Marque’s first album in several years, she has long been a staple on the local scene, consistently performing since she was nineteen, rising from dive bars to the main stage of the Underground Music Showcase, where she performed for her tenth time this year.

So her upcoming concert on Friday, December 6, at the newly revamped Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox makes a lot of sense when you see the bill – it may as well be dubbed the Local Legends Show. Along with Marque, there will be headliner and scene-maker Wes Watkins, who is celebrating an EP release, as well as Wheelchair Sports Camp, the longtime hip-hop project from activist Kalyn Heffernan. Then on Thursday, December 12, Marque will headline CPR’s annual Colorado Matters Holiday Extravaganza.

Marque often performs with Watkins, who is a well-known musical force in the jazz scene. “I’m super-blessed, because I have very heavy hitters playing with me,” she says. “Wes Watkins was one of the first people that I met in the music scene, and he really helped guide me in the early days. I’m deeply grateful for his mentorship, which, he doesn’t see it like that, but I do. We’ve been friends for over fifteen years. And Wes doesn’t like to play with other people, so it’s really special that he has agreed to sing for me.”

Her backing band, which will be with her at Ophelia’s, also includes guitarist Enmanuel Alexander, drummer Braxton Kahn, backing vocalist Yasmine Emani and new addition Ana Luna, a violinist. “I have this badass crew of people who are incredible musicians, very dedicated to the craft,” Marque says with a smile, “but they are also just good people.”

She also does solo acoustic sets, as she will for CPR’s event, but no matter the iteration, every Marque concert leaves audiences spellbound. The exchange of energy between the artist and her listeners becomes almost tangible, vibrating through her ethereal lyrics and sonics. It is part of a natural gift that she possesses, but her years of work in honing her performance cannot be ignored.

Marque, who is now 35, grew up in Denver and graduated from East High School before attending Colorado State University in Fort Collins to study psychology. “I went for a semester and a half,” she says, “and then I dropped out to be a songwriter.”

Aside from some piano lessons when she was a child, her only experience in music had been choir in high school. But while she was at CSU, Marque realized how much she missed singing. “There was a canned food drive put on by Black Student Services…a canned-food-drive-slash-talent-show,” she says. “So I brought a can of food, and I just decided to get up and sing something a cappella.”

While she was singing in front of the room, members of the audience began to cry. “It was an epiphany moment for me,” Marque recalls: “This is what I’m supposed to be doing.”

But after she withdrew from school, Marque suffered severe depression for several months. Her parents were shocked by her decision, and she was starting to be, as well. “I had no game plan,” she says. “No fucking clue what I was doing. And so a lot of the time I was lying around watching movies and listening to music.”

Her sister handed her a musical to watch: Once. “She told me it would inspire me,” Marque says, “and she was right.”

After the credits rolled, she started writing. And once she started, she didn’t stop.

“Then it was just slowly spending eight to ten hours a day at the piano, trying to figure out how to play music and how to write it,” Marque says. “And then I started playing in random dive bars with X’s on my hands, not old enough to even be in there.” But she was quickly enfolded by a network of musicians who recognized her potential.

Although she started performing in public in 2008, Marque didn’t sit down to record until 2016, when she released her first album, Live and Die Like This. “Going from live performance to the studio was such a hard transition. It took me years to actually enjoy it. I hated it,” she admits.

“I didn’t enjoy it because it just felt like I’m alone in that space, and one of my biggest things with creating and playing music is the connection that it creates,” she continues. “But this challenged me to connect with myself. I became more introspective; we hide a lot in our unconscious. Being in the studio and just music-creating in general has given me a pathway to just get to know myself better.”

Her new album, Midheaven, sees a new side of Marque. “I love this project,” she says. “It’s a deviation from my last two, Right Brain and Left Brain, which came from a place of hurt, a place of pain.”

She’s never been afraid to address moodier topics both lyrically and sonically, always concocting complementary sounds that seem to shimmer and smoke around layered themes of love, philosophy and the human experience – the good and bad. But Midheaven, she says, is a result of meeting her insecurities, her subconscious and unconscious selves, head on, and the result is an album that resonates the positivity and healing she’s found and hopes to spread.

“This one feels a lot lighter,” she says. “There’s some darker tones and sounds in it, sonically, but energetically and lyrically, it’s a departure from the pain and brooding artist that my younger self was. This is a step into being more embodied, having more fun, more enjoyment. Allowing myself to be in my bliss and have that experience so that I can share it with other people.”

Marque has grown as an artist. And after touring around Europe as well as the East Coast this past year, she’s brimming with gratitude. “I’m so thankful for my eighteen-year-old self, who had the courage to tune everyone out and do what I needed and wanted to do for myself, because I feel like the older we get, sometimes the harder that can be,” she says. “Fortune favors the bold.”

She’s taken many leaps of faith, Marque says, but music has been the most fruitful. “Nothing beats performing live. The energy is so potent. It’s otherworldly,” she muses. “You are finding connection and family through sound, and that’s why I call myself the opener of portals instead of ‘singer-songwriter.’ Because on a deeper level, what we are doing here is opening portals, a doorway into another dimension, another world where the possibilities are infinite.”

So going to a Kayla Marque show is much more than a concert – it’s an interdimensional opportunity. After all, Marque is from the future.

“It’s expansion, and in the long run, it’s always worth it,” Marque says. “You get to deepen your relationship with yourself, which then has this ripple effect of being able to deepen your connection with others, or your relationship to your craft, your relationship to your environment. You get to expand more in the spaces that you already occupy, or move into new spaces.

“It’s scary as fuck,” she adds, “and it’s uncomfortable. But that’s the space in which we grow.”

Kayla Marque performs at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, 1215 20th Street, at 9 p.m. Friday, December 6 (tickets are $37), and at CPR’s Colorado Matters Holiday Extravaganza, at 7 p.m. Thursday, December 12, Central Presbyterian Church, 1660 Sherman Street (tickets are $25-$45).