Interviews/Billboard

*Main article: Billboard*

Imperfection should be celebrated, not tolerated. That's the gospel according to Natalia Kills, the British singer/songwriter whose debut LP, *Perfectionist*, was released on Will.i.am/Cherrytree/Interscope in Germany in April, and arrives domestically on Aug. 16.

"It's OK, I think, to be fucked up," says Kills, who will join Katy Perry on select tour dates throughout August before headlining her own tour of Germany in September. "If you're broke, let's celebrate that. If you're heartbroken, if you're still angry, if you're still lost, if you need revenge, let's celebrate that. Let's dance to that. Let's fist-pump the night away. Let's talk about it. Let's confront it. Let's make power out of that rather than weakness."

That the dark, electro-pop *Perfectionist* looks to explore the bright sides of bad situations may be owed to Kills' own strength in weathering the breaks of the entertainment business. After first attaining success as a child actor in the United Kingdom (BBC 1's "All About Me"), Kills turned to music and released the rap single "Don't Play Nice" under the name Verbalicious through U.K. dance label All Around the World Productions in February 2005. A full-length LP never materialized, however, and she struggled as a songwriter for a few years before re-surfacing—under the name Verbz—in January 2008. The RAC remix of her song "Shopaholic" caught the attention of Perez Hilton, who posted the track on his blog. The heightened attention drew traffic to her Myspace page, and in November of that year she signed to Interscope through Will.i.am Music Group.

"Will spent a lot of time with me," says Kills, who also appears on LMFAO's "Champagne Showers" from the duo's top 20 album *Sorry for Party Rocking* (also a Will.i.am Music Group project). "We hung out, we did normal people stuff. We went shopping, partied [and] we made some music. He really put creative energy into finding his new artist, [his] new protégée."

*Perfectionist* is executive-produced by Interscope head of A&R/Cherrytree Records founder Martin Kierszenbaum, along with Will.i.am, and Kills co-wrote on every song. The set brims with driving rhythm sections and edgy minor-key pop melodies with the bulk of the production being provided by producers Ron Feemster (Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole), Jeff Baskher (Kanye West, Alicia Keys) and Fernando Garibay (Lady Gaga).

"When she's in the studio, she's influencing the timbre of the sound," Kierszenbaum says of Kills. "She approaches the production of a song almost [as] if she's making a movie. I like working with her a lot because she's just as focused on the soundscape as she is on the melody and the lyrics and all the songwriting aspects."

The album's third and latest single, "Free," which features Will.i.am and samples Kate Bush's 1978 single "Wuthering Heights," was co-produced by Baskher and No I.D. The song is a celebratory ode to balling on a budget ("Wanna be like Midas, when my bank account is minus," she sings), informed by Kills' real-life job as a waitress during her days as a struggling songwriter.

On other songs from *Perfectionist*, Kills seeks perfection in everything—herself, in others, in material things—finds the complete opposite and then has to make the best of it.

On "Superficial," she explores her fascination with the finer things, but then asks her lover if he'd stand by her if she had nothing on "If I Was God." She dreams of fairy-tale romance on the album's second single, "Wonderland" (released in April), but then calls relationships a recipe for self-destruction on "Love Is a Suicide." On the album's S&M-inspired first single, "Mirrors" (a top 10 hit in Germany, Austria and Poland when it was released last August), she's a sex-starved dominatrix, then the hard-rock-tinged "Acid Annie" finds her acting out a revenge fantasy. In the end, she's a ball of confusion, no more perfect than she was at the beginning.

"No matter how close I get to what I've always wanted, it's still never ever enough," she says. "I don't think I'm the only person in the world like that."

### Background

This interview was featured in the July 2-9, 2011 issue of Billboard Magazine.