Love letter to everyone follows Jayla Kai’s 2018 debut EP Epitome and her 2023 release The Short Song Project. Since she released Epitome at 18, Kai has spent time honing her skills not only as a musician but also as an video editor and animator, leading her to a day job creating visuals for other artists. For the past couple of years, Kai has workshopped the songs on Love letter to everyone while working on videos for artists like Tune-Yards, Future Islands, Mdou Moctar, Julien Baker, Car Seat Headrest, Adrianne Lenker. With all this under her belt, Kai is back to self-release her new EP—a move both spontaneously-conceived and a long time coming.

Navigating the space between her day job and the career she wants in music, Kai realized “A month or two ago I was thinking about the finished project I had, files just sitting on my computer, and decided I should put it out myself. Instead of waiting for someone else to come support it, I realized, I can do this. It’s okay that this doesn’t look how I thought it would; I made this, with people I love working with, so that other people could hear it. Nothing else is more important.”

In creating Love Letter to Everyone, Kai sought to bridge the soft sounds of folk (her first love) with the impact and punch of a 4-piece band. She wrote the songs on guitar and built them out into larger worlds with producers Ruben Radlauer (Model/Actriz) and Allen Tate (San Fermin). The band for the EP “exists in fragments across different sessions and times, impossible to ever unite in reality,” explains Kai. Most of the instruments were played by Kai, Radlauer and Tate, “bending time back, over and over, until we heard something whole emerge.”

“The future comes slowly but past comes up quick, I don’t know what to do but I’m already doing it,” Kai writes in What I read on the labels in the fridge. She is actively grappling with how to embrace the present—its uncertainty, her own desires and impatience—while remembering her agency. “I’m learning to make music outside of the promise that I’ll get to do it full time” Kai says. “I’m trying to make music out of love.”

Kai says the EP itself “is based around a feeling of overwhelming love, like when you walk outside on the first warm days. It comes often when the love you feel for a particular person overflows and extends to everybody, everything. It can arrive in little envelopes everywhere and make you feel an overwhelming, bursting open feeling. That feeling is what becomes a ‘love letter to everyone.’”