For San José’s Kaleena Zanders, Dance Music Is ‘a Magical Experience’

As Kaleena Zanders’ song “The Light” blasted through my headphones, I pedaled faster.

Soundtracked by energetic hi-hats, symphonic strings, a bass line from the underworld and Zanders’ heavenly vocals, my bike ride became a spiritual experience. And I’m clearly not the only one moved by Zanders’ music.

For more than a decade, Zanders has played nightclubs and festivals, and even once had a song featured in a Super Bowl Toyota commercial. Her debut album Anything Goes dropped last month. It’s been highlighted by Billboard, with two of its songs, “Stronger Than Machines” and “Anything Goes,” spotlighted by ESPN.

As Zanders launches a multiple-city tour with stops across the United States and Canada, she gives credit to her upbringing in San José for making it possible.

“I ended up going to Independence High School,” Zanders tells me during a recent video call, “and I played a ton of sports.”

As a teenage basketball and rugby player, Zanders also got deep into her emo bag with fits from Hot Topic at Eastridge Mall, across the street from where she lived. While fashion and athletics were important, art proved significant in her upbringing.

“Musical theater was a huge part of my life,” says Zanders, who took classes at the San Jose Children’s Choir from the age of 8 to the age of 11. She had no problem singing to herself, but Zanders was a shy about appearing on stage.

“I was really caught off guard that my mom would put me in these musical theater classes,” Zanders reflects. But it all makes sense now. “I remember coming alive on stage,” Zanders says. “I get it.”

Having a musical outlet proved vital as she navigated her teenage years.

“Understanding that I’m queer,” says Zanders, “that was actually pretty hard for me in high school.” So she leaned into music, practicing on a piano in her mom’s garage, and eventually taking guitar lessons — which got her into rock music.

In college, Zanders played in a band, Moulder’s Lounge, which she calls “the most euphoric, life-changing experience.” The band allowed her to combine musical theater, instrumentation and rock music, and would’ve been big, Zanders believes, if they’d stayed together.

Zanders eventually moved to Los Angeles and enrolled at the Musicians Institute. One day, while she was working at Trader Joe’s in Hollywood, a friend told her about a DJ who needed someone to provide vocals for an EDM track.

“I wasn’t the kind of kid that could go out and rave,” Zanders says with a laugh; her mother wouldn’t have allowed it. “I literally knew nothing of rave culture,” she says. But she quickly learned.

Zanders now plays in nightclubs as well as sports arenas. They’re two very different settings, except that both are male-dominated. Simply by being present in those spaces, Zanders tells me, “as a woman, as a Black woman, as a queer woman, I naturally am gonna make some sort of statement. I don’t even need to say anything.”

Pivoting from writing verses and choruses of rock lyrics to short top-lines for dance anthems wasn’t easy.

Simplifying her lyrics felt like “it was like a diss to the art,” Zanders says. “I’m like, ‘What do you mean you only need one or two lines?’” But after digging deeper into the history of dance, and the work of artists like Robin S. and Sonique, Zanders understood the power of “big diva vocals.” With only a few choice lyrics, Zanders affirms, one can “still very much understand, in a potent way, what the song is about.”

Featuring Shift K3Y, Bipolar Sunshine and Hayley May, each of the seven songs on Anything Goes pack in a load of emotions and storytelling. Even the album name has multiple meanings.

Heartbroken after an acquaintance stole something of hers, it hit Zanders that life is a free-for-all with no rules, for better or for worse.

“Look at these motherfuckers, they’re out here just stealing shit,” she says. “Okay, fuck! Let me have the audacity to do what I wanna do, which is good stuff. But let me not be afraid, because these people aren’t afraid.”

Anything Goes could also describe Zanders herself. She’s an athletic pianist and former mohawked rocker who loves pop music and sings like gospel is in her blood. She also benefited from her mother’s guidance, inherited her’s father’s vocal abilities and stands on the shoulders of her grandmother.

“She was a prolific piano player,” Zanders says of her grandmother, a choir director who died when Zanders was just an infant but who left behind a trove of archival recordings. “Hearing that,” Zanders explains, “made me think, ‘Oh, okay, this is where some of my musical abilities come from.'”

Zanders does not claim any one faith. But whether her music’s blasting through a sound system in a New York nightclub, playing at an outdoors festival in Canada or slapping in the headphones of a journalist riding a bike in California, the spiritual element is evident.

“Dance music,” Zanders professes, “it can be a magical experience.”

Kaleena Zanders performs Friday, July 17 as part of the three-day Dirtybird Cookout and Northern Nights musical festival in Piercy, California. Tickets and more details here.