“No one told me,” says singer-songwriter Domino Kirke, her soft, ethereal voice becoming more staccato with each word. “No one prepared me. No one is talking about it.”
The New York-based musician, birth educator and mother of two—with twins on the way—is talking about the first stillbirth she experienced in her career as a doula. “It changed all my wiring,” she says of the harsh sense of injustice she felt when holding a stillborn baby for the first time. “Like birth, you never get used to it. You realize just how close we are to death, and you can’t take anything for granted after that.”
Kirke realizes this isn’t typical fodder for an interview. But Kirke, 42, is talking about the things no one wants to talk about, perhaps most poignantly on her new album, The Most Familiar Star, out April 18. It’s a bare-all kind of record, co-written with Eliot Krimsky and produced by Chris Taylor from indie rock band Grizzly Bear, with themes ranging from miscarriage and birth to sexual abuse, parental neglect, love—the maternal kind, the romantic kind, the messy kind that exists between you and your ex. “How do we hold all these truths at once and not collapse?” She asks somewhat rhetorically, somewhat not.
Growing up, life looked “good on paper,” says Kirke, who was born in London and moved to the U.S. when she was 12. Her parents, the English rock drummer Simon Kirke and the British fashion and interiors darling Lorraine Kirke, eventually settled Domino, her older brother, and two younger sisters, Jemima and Lola, both actresses, in New York City in the mid ‘90s. “We had the parties and the names and the homes, you know, and the insanity and the excitement and the glitz and the glam,” she says, “but there was no parenting happening—ever.”
Kirke studied classical piano and voice at La Guardia High School in Queens, and embarked on a solo career in music until she got pregnant at age 26. After giving birth to her son, Cassius, and feeling unsupported—by her family, by her artist community, by her birth team—she found herself setting aside music for body work, later becoming a doula. In 2012, she co-founded the childbirth collective and community space Carriage House Birth. In their first five years, they grew from 10 to over 100 full-time doulas in New York and Los Angeles. In 2018, she co-founded the community space Grand Street Healing Project in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
