“I talk about this need for belonging amongst self-doubt, new relationships, failure of those relationships, heartbreak, addiction, familial loss, and how all of those things shaped me as a person,” killanddieonce explains, pensively reflecting on his formative experiences and lyrical inclinations. “I’m not done getting with the program. It’s still something that needs to be got with, but how can I deal with all these extraneous issues in my life? This constant threat of getting with the program of life?”
Deftly striking a balance between the introspective and iterative, bridging the gap between past and present, UCSD-based rapper-producer killanddieonce (abbr. KADO) tackles growth, change, and self-discovery in his debut record GET WITH THE PROGRAM. Emotive storytelling meets candid bars and captivating soundscapes, as KADO flairfully delivers cathartic insights and infectious rhythms.
KADO’s journey, both personally and creatively, has been defined from the very onset by his multicultural background and heritage. Drawing influences from the diverse cultures of Kenya and Italy, and now based in San Diego, he reflects on the places and people who’ve shaped his personhood and examines the process of finding his own groove along the way.
“My mom was always playing the piano when I was younger, so I learned how to play the piano when I was very young,” he shares. “My sister, who is five years older than me, was really, really into Odd Future at the time that I was in late elementary to early middle school… That really influenced the direction that I went down. I started playing the trumpet, I started getting a lot more into jazz and jazz-related music, so it’s honestly not a surprise that I kind of ended up in the sort of jazz side of alternative hip hop.”
Channeling the personal and universal, GET WITH THE PROGRAM offers a series of heartbreak vignettes and self-confessional anecdotes, providing a glimpse into KADO’s world as he contemplates the pressures of coming of age across a succinct seven tracks. Wholly relatable yet deeply experiential, the rapper explores the misery and mirth of the 20-something-year-old experience in the 21st century through hip-hop underpinnings and jazz/R&B sensibilities. “I hope people can just leave the project with thoughts—start thinking about themselves,” he reveals. “For people who are kind of around our age, that will be a little easier than people who are in their 40s, unfortunately, but that’s not to say that nobody else who’s not within our group can’t relate to it.”
Joining us in the days following the LP’s release, KSDT Radio’s own audio engineer opens up about his dynamic upbringing, releasing fears surrounding vulnerability, and the neverending process of getting with the program.
A Conversation with killanddieonce:
KSDT: Introduce yourself to those who might be unfamiliar with who you are and the music you make.
KADO: My name is KADO! My artist name is killanddieonce; it’s what KADO stands for, which you can call me colloquially just to keep it easier. It’s a little bit of a mouthful of a name. I make alternative hip-hop music, sort of in the jazz rap theme, but I kind of like to bounce around between old-school hip-hop, alternative jazz rap, a little bit of R&B, and maybe even some pop mixed in there.
KSDT: That actually segues perfectly into my first real question! I want to know about your name; the acronym is pretty self-explanatory, but what’s the story behind it? How and when did you come up with the name?
KADO: It’s a little bit of an underwhelming story. I was maybe in 9th or tenth grade. One of the first people I started rapping with and I would go to the river that we lived by, and we would just freestyle for literally two to three hours on end. One day, during the freestyle, I just said, “Kill and Die Once, you can call me KADO,” and it kind of just stuck from there. After I came up with that, I decided to assign more meaning to it, so it didn’t look like I just came up with it in a freestyle. The way I like to think about it is a little bit adjacent to a YOLO—a “you only live once” kind of thing. “Kill” in this case means to make the most of your life, and do a killing basically.
KSDT: How did you get started with making and releasing music then? You said that you were freestyling with your friend in high school, but I noticed that you didn’t release your first song on Spotify until January of last year. Was pursuing music always in the cards for you?
KADO: Yeah! I’ve pretty much known since I was in fifth grade. I dressed up as a rapper for Halloween when I was in fifth grade. I think I was modeling it off Lil Wayne, because at the time, I was really obsessed with him. I came to school dressed like that. I wanted to copy the big chain, skater clothing. From then, that’s when I kind of knew. Up until around ninth grade though, I was pretty much just working on my writing. I wasn’t even trying to focus on flow or anything; I was just focusing on writing bars, because that was the first thing that drew me to rap music specifically. Rappers like Big L, J. Cole, Earl Sweatshirt—people who had these crazy double, sometimes triple entendres. I would try to model my lyrics off of them until around 10th grade, where I actually started recording music with one of my friends, and we got into the production side of things.
It was really, really unserious stuff though. We were just having fun over beats. We weren’t trying to do anything with it, but we got a little bit of motion through SoundCloud just in our general area. All that music is long gone now. By the time I made it to college, I had gotten more serious, more into my introspective lyrics. Once I met Diego, once I met Shawn, things just kind of kept going up. Production just kept leveling up. As you said, I dropped my first thing on Spotify in 2023, but I’ve been putting stuff on SoundCloud since 2016 or 2017.
KSDT: Woah! Tell me more about the SoundCloud stuff.
KADO: Not too much to talk about. It’s really poorly mixed. When I was rapping at that time, I would only do double entendres. My friend and I really liked X and Ski Mask the Slump God, so we would try to copy the way that they would rap and how they would use similes and metaphors in every single line to have fun and test ourselves out. We would just try to make each other laugh with the stupidest bars that we could think of.
KSDT: I’m surprised at how long and how consistently you’ve been at it! What was your upbringing’s relation to music, and how has music shaped your life now?
KADO: Oh, it’s been a huge part of my life ever since I was a really young kid. My mom was always playing the piano when I was younger, so I learned how to play the piano when I was very young. I even took lessons for a little bit, but classical music wasn’t really speaking to me. At that time, I wasn’t really tapped into jazz piano, so I just tossed the piano to the side for a second. My sister, who is five years older than me, was really, really into Odd Future at the time that I was in late elementary to early middle school. Whenever we would drive to school, she was always putting me on to that music. That really influenced the direction that I went down. I started playing the trumpet, I started getting a lot more into jazz and jazz-related music, so it’s honestly not a surprise that I kind of ended up in the sort of jazz side of alternative hip hop.
KSDT: Did you teach yourself trumpet?
KADO: No! I mean, partially, but I played in concert band and jazz band throughout middle school and high school.
KSDT: That’s a really cool background to have regardless! Now that we’ve kind of established what got you into music in a general sense, I obviously want to talk about the album, GET WITH THE PROGRAM. I feel like this is a popular question, but what is the program?
KADO: The program of life, in essence. The album is a coming-of-age story in its simplest term. I grew up overseas. I only moved to the United States when I was 17. Every three or four years, I would move to another country, wherever my mom had to work, and it’s the story of me coming to the United States for the first time.
I talk about this need for belonging amongst self-doubt, new relationships, failure of those relationships, heartbreak, addiction, familial loss, and how all of those things shaped me as a person. But, I’m not done getting with the program. It’s still something that needs to be got with, but how can I deal with all these extraneous issues in my life? This constant threat of getting with the program of life? Stable house, stable relationships, stable income, all of that, while also dealing with more emotional issues.
KSDT: Where would you say you currently are in the process of getting with the program?
KADO: Now that I’ve kind of found my sense of belonging, I think I’ve found my sound as an artist. That part of getting with the program is done, but I’m still in my really, really early phases of being an artist. That threat of getting with the program is still constantly looming over me. My parents are asking me what my plans are after this. I’m graduating university this year, so I’ve got to figure out the plans for the future. That kind of program has not been done.
KSDT: Given that the program is just coming to grips with life, in essence, is it subjective then? Your call to action or slogan is “GET WITH THE PROGRAM,” which I assumed was your program. I don’t know if this makes sense, but does the program apply to everyone’s lives, or is it just your life specifically?
KADO: There are two ways that I kind of like to use “GET WITH THE PROGRAM.” When I use it in my marketing of the project, it’s kind of like, “I want you to get with the program of what I’m doing.” But as for the program itself, I feel like one thing that can attract people to the album is the fact that the program, for the most, is kind of the same, no matter where you are—at least within like first world Western countries. Everybody’s got to find a way to pay their bills, everyone’s got to maintain relationships and deal with hardships in their life. That kind of program, I think, is consistent. I feel like if I had structured it just on my experiences and not things that people can relate to, then it would make the project a little bit less connecting to an audience. The program of life is something that people could share.
KSDT: It’s quite universal. What did you feel personally then when you were making this record? Did you have a mission statement or what, if anything, did you hope to accomplish with it?
KADO: I really just wanted to give people who listen to rap music something else to listen to that they can relate to. I feel like we’re in an era of hip hop music where… Obviously, there are incredible geniuses putting out very introspective stuff, but I feel like a lot of the stuff that is propagated in the media isn’t necessarily that introspective. I’m not stupid. I understand the reasons why that is. Not everyone wants to listen to introspective shit all the time. Sometimes, people just want to turn up, but I feel like it was so important to me to make a project that people can relate to. I feel grateful every time somebody sends me a text, like, “Man, like what you said in this song, that same thing happened to me. I can totally relate to what you’re talking about. I can feel the emotion that you put into this song,” basically thanking me for putting that out there. For guys, it’s a little bit more difficult for us to want to express our emotions and deal with that. I feel like a lot of dudes push it down. I use my music as a space to deal with my personal issues, so if I can help other people deal with their emotions by relating to my music, I think that’s really cool.
KSDT: I think “1-800-PRO-GRAM” does that very well. It’s a really candid and vulnerable song as far as lyrics are concerned. How have you been able to navigate self-expression, authenticity, and vulnerability in that sense? Do you dread it ever?
KADO: Wow, that’s a really good question. Definitely. But I feel like that dread is one of the things you have to get over in order to get with the actual program in life. That song in particular is probably one of the most introspective songs on the project. I go pretty deep into personal issues. I think it’s something that I used to dread a lot more when I was writing the song. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of written songs that haven’t even been recorded—that maybe I didn’t even ever want to record. It was just like an outlet for me to put my dread into these lyrics.
When it comes to GET WITH THE PROGRAM and actually putting those lyrics out to an audience, it makes you feel very vulnerable. I find that when I talk to my family about the project, it’s like now all of these issues that they didn’t even know about are coming to light. Now, my mom and sister are asking me about stuff that I talked about in the album. What I realized at the end of the day is that what I portray in my lyrics is how I felt in that individual moment. Putting it down and writing allows me to mature. I dread it to an extent, but it’s also a necessary dread. If I didn’t do that, then I don’t know where the fuck I’d be right now.
KSDT: Do you feel like people’s perceptions of you have changed after you released this project?
KADO: That’s a great question. I would say definitely, but from an emotional standpoint, I would have to talk to more people. I’m like, you know, “I hope you don’t think I’m fucking depressed as shit and want everything to go away in life after listening to this project.”
I feel like their perception of my music itself is the thing that has changed the most. I liked the music I was making before. I liked the writing in it, and I liked the instrumentals. I didn’t like the sound. I spent the past two years learning how to mix, master, everything to do with audio itself so that I could execute the vision I had in my head. I can bring other people into my team and not just have a vision, but also know how to communicate the vision to them. That’s probably the most important thing. In doing that, I think I was able to get a lot more refined of a product. I’ve never spent that much time mixing or mastering anything in my life. I think the biggest change people will see who have heard my music before is like, “Oh, wow, now he’s kind of serious.”
KSDT: It comes across for sure. The process is also something I was curious about—you talked about having a super OCD approach on Instagram. What were the challenges that came with that, or the challenges that came with the project in general?
KADO: The challenge that came with that was compromise for sure. I mentioned Shawn and Diego; those were my right and left-hand men for this project. It definitely would not have been possible to finish it without them. It was tough. I had to make compromises, and they had to make compromises. The release date for the project was April 2024, and then obviously it didn’t get released until October. That’s not because we weren’t working on it; I just underestimated the amount of time it would take to get to the point where I saw the song I envisioned in my mind. I just couldn’t calculate the exact amount of time it would take to get there. I had to compromise, because I didn’t want to push the album release date back. I had to realize that my goals were unrealistic, and we had to push it back if I wanted to get it to the quality that I wanted it to be at.
I also had to put some things to the side. I would be tripping over this millisecond fraction of my song for like an hour, and then like Shawn or Diego was like, “Dude, literally not one person is going to ever hear this.” Those are things that I had to realize. I’m sure I wasted so much time just focusing on these details that in retrospect probably didn’t even matter, but, you know, I think that’s part of the process. I just really didn’t want to go back and listen to this project and be like, “Oh, I would have changed this.” Some people just get stuck in that loop and don’t ever finish. The fact that I had that not just me, but also my friends, with that “We’re going to finish” mentality was what really allowed us to keep that OCD approach, but in moderation.
KSDT: If the original release date was in April, how long was the creation process in total?
KADO: Oh, the oldest songs go back to 2022. Some of the bars in it go back 2019 or 2020. It’s been a really, really long time in the making. We probably made 60 to 70 songs!
KSDT: In that case, what allowed you to break out of that loop of honing in on milliseconds of “flaws?” What kind of helped you think outside of that?
KADO: It was trying to listen to the song from the perspective of someone else. I’m sure any people who make their own music can relate to that. Once you listen to your own track so many times, you sort of lose perception of it. The sense of realism goes away.
You’re no longer in the listener’s seat. You’re in the creator’s seat. People have a tendency to overhype their own creations a little bit just because they created it. They can see the coolness in it rather than a listener who is very, very objective with whether or not they like it. It was trying to think from the head of the average listener. Everything went on a priority scale. This is not to say that if we hear a problem, we shouldn’t fix the problem, but we would prioritize all the problems that we did have and work down to that list. What we found is that once we fixed a lot of the major problems and some of the minor ones, then those really, really minor problems kind of became obsolete.
KSDT: Back to the more fun questions! “(FALLLL) AGAIN” is my favourite track. I was listening to the entire project with my brother yesterday when I was writing questions, and he really liked it too. I like how it stands out from the rest of the other songs on the record with that electronic element. I don’t really have a specific question, but I would love to know more about that song.
KADO: First off, thank you to you and your brother for taking the time to listen to the project. It’s only 20 minutes, but listening to an album front to back isn’t something that the average person always does, so I appreciate you guys taking the time to listen to that! I’m really glad you like “(FALLLL) AGAIN” because that is my favourite track as well. I don’t necessarily think it’s the best track on the album, but I think it was the process of making that song. I mean, it’s a really good track. If you look at the credits for it, it’s a really massive collaboration. My original inspiration stems from King Britt and his look at electronic music. His old student, Lukas Ehlers, sent me the instrumental for the track in its raw form and was just like, “Yeah, I made this track, but I can’t think of any ideas for it. Let me know if you have anything.”
I made a voice memo to it, rapped everything out, got the melody for the hook that we had Riohn sing, and then got my verse. I really wanted to get as many people involved in this track as possible, because it was this real genre blend. I knew that I couldn’t do everything on my own. I took Shawn into a room and we looked at my melody for the chorus, we filled in the words for it, then we brought it to Riohn. I’ll sing sometimes, but I wouldn’t say singing is my strong suit. We were like, “Okay, we need the best singer that we know,” so we called Riohn and he loved the idea! The song sounded great. We had the most fun recording session of the entire project. We recorded like 300 takes with Riohn, spent six hours in there, and did two recording sessions. It was just so much fun. We were dancing in the studio the entire time.
Then, we were like, “Why don’t we make it a little dancey, a little more of a house vibe?” So, we called up the best house producer that we know, and he put in a little section. Shawn added some more vocals, we added another synth in there, and we made the switch up. It was too long, because I was really persistent on putting this one-minute outro of Riohn just humming to the beat, because a lot of records that I listened to from the early-2000s kind of had that vibe. I wanted to capture that, but because of that, the song got to over four minutes, which is the death zone. Now we were like, “Okay, if we’re going to keep the outro, we’ve got to figure out a way to make the song more interesting.” That’s why we called in the house producer. It was just a sick collaboration between six musicians, all UCSD-based. It was just a super cool experience.
KSDT: This is actually like a random question; it’s not even on topic, but the project has a lot of random little adlibs and harmonies saying “get with the program” throughout the songs. It’s super cool, and it kind of reminds you of what you’re listening to. What was the idea behind that?
KADO: I really love albums that don’t sound like they just made all the tracks and then chose a random name at the end. It sounds like everything is made with purpose. I kind of wanted something to tie together all of the songs under the GET WITH THE PROGRAM theme in a more literal way. A lot of the little kind of clips are just samples, but whenever you hear the barbershop quartet-esque singing “get with the program,” that’s the same singer who is on “(FALLLL) AGAIN.” That same day that we recorded the vocals, we had him do those little barbershop quartets as well because he’s an acapella singer. He has all the crazy harmonies that you could think of. That was something a little silly to make the project a little bit more entertaining! I’m really, really proud to have finished this project with the most incredible group of people who stood by me the entire time.
KSDT: What do you hope people take away from it all?
KADO: Honestly, that’s kind of up to the listener. I want it to be positive regardless of what they take out of it. I would hope that people don’t, you know, get negative thoughts or get anything not positive at the end of my project, even though I do talk about very sad and depressing things. Talking about this stuff and putting it out there is necessary for you to mature and improve as a person, so I hope that that can be communicated. I hope people can just leave the project with thoughts—start thinking about themselves. For people who are kind of around our age, that will be a little easier than people who are in their 40s, unfortunately, but that’s not to say that nobody else who’s not within our group can’t relate to it.
KSDT: When you parallel your work now with what you’ve released in the past, where would you say you noticed the biggest difference, whether that’s with your approach, mentality, or skills?
KADO: I mean, the biggest thing is production. As a rapper, I wouldn’t say I changed so much between all those releases. Maybe my flow improved a little bit and my overall confidence on the microphone. I’m sure I would have been going for a more high-production thing had I known what to do in order to accomplish that, but I was also drawing from rappers like MF Doom and how their tracks sounded, which is this very raw thing. It’s just about the rapping, which I feel like was a good point for me. If I was too focused on production when I was still maturing as a rapper, I feel like I wouldn’t have put all my effort into bars.
My prime is still awaiting, as I said in “SUBTLE (ENTERTAINMENT).” I’m not going to put a ceiling over myself right now, but I feel like I got to the point where I was good enough at rapping to make a rap project that I could focus on the production for.
KSDT: In that case, what do you want for yourself now? What’s your driving force? Is it more self-discovery or domination?
KADO: It’s a little bit more self-discovery first. I would love to skip to the domination, but I feel like I still need to mature and find my footing as an artist in the industry before I can go straight to the domination. The industry right now is not exactly tailored for an artist like me, so still trying to figure out how I can fit in within that bigger picture of music itself. But once that happens, it’s domination time!
KSDT: What can people look forward to now from you? Do you have like a call to action or anything that you want listeners or readers to really know or keep in the back of their heads?
KADO: Keep listening to the project. More music coming soon. I’m going to let you guys sit on this for a little bit, but then after that, I’m going to be dropping singles every couple of weeks to keep you all interested! Look out for performances. Look out for a merch drop. I’m really trying to focus on the creative side of the project. I don’t have the biggest budget in the world, but I’m going to try to work around that—use the resources that I do have access to to really explore this project more from a creative standpoint.
Without King Britt, this album would not have been possible. This was probably the original program that I got with. About a year ago, or a year and a half ago, when I was getting really into the production of the songs, he really believed in me. He told me, “You need to make an album, and you need to put it out in a few months.” That sparked this fuse inside of my head, and I’ve just been fully locked in ever since.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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