I spent most of my 20s treating the worst year of my life like wreckage I had to crawl out of, never clocking that the fucking thing was building me the whole time. The guy I’d planned my whole future around left without warning a couple years back, and the months after gutted me so completely I was sure I’d never feel like myself again. I did come back. Took a while, but I rebuilt and mostly stopped thinking about it. Then last week I watched myself handle a work crisis stone-calm, three moves ahead while everyone around me lost their shit, and it clicked that this composure didn’t come from the easy years. It got forged in that fucking ruin. That steadiness under fire has a name. It’s the mind of Athena, the Greek goddess who stayed sharp while the sky came down and won by out-thinking the room. The year I thought destroyed me had been turning me into her. Then Kai Krilove’s ‘Mind of Athena’ came on and I had to sit the fuck down, because it’s that whole rewiring set to a jazz-strutting dance-pop groove. This song knows me better than my last three therapists combined.
Let me talk about what’s happening under Kai’s vocal because the production is doing half the work and deserves the credit. It’s dance-pop with a jazz strut slinking through it with the kind of low groove that rolls its hips instead of stomping. Kai’s vocal slides over the top of it with all that vintage R&B smoke – the kind of delivery that could make a grown man lose his train of thought mid-sentence. The rhythm never once rushes you, just keeps that cool unbothered sway going and lets everything build on its own schedule. Some songs play in the background. This one climbs into your bloodstream and starts rearranging the furniture.
She opens the whole thing on a search that’s already half-answered. “I was looking for something / Lost and found myself a thousand times / I rewrote my whole story / Trying to find the meaning in life.” Kai sounds completely unbothered doing the searching, like someone who’s gotten lost so many times it stopped qualifying as an emergency years ago. Rewriting your whole story sounds like a full-blown crisis until you clock that every woman worth knowing has done it four or five times and just calls it growth.
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Then she goes quiet and lets the real subject of the song speak up. “Even when the crowd was quiet / I heard your cry.” The crowd went silent and the only voice left in the room was the one she’d been ignoring the whole damn time. It might be a soulmate or the buried part of herself she’d talked over for years but whoever it is it was calling out from under all that noise until she finally shut up and listened. God, I love when women stop performing for a crowd that was never really watching and start paying attention to the thing that actually had something to say.
The next lines are where she names what’s actually keeping her standing. “Something ’bout you / Keeps me alive / Something ’bout the way you / Built me to survive.” This is the part that made me want to text the track to every woman I love. The “you” here didn’t just show up with snacks and good vibes on a bad night, it drew up the blueprints and built her to outlast the kind of collapse that levels other people. She puts her own damn survival on the record and signs her name right under it, proud and crediting the architect.
The chorus is where the goddess walks in and the song levels up. “We can let the sky fall / Sun could turn the lights off / We get up / Nobody said, said it’s gon’ be easy / Heart of a soulmate, mind of Athena / You built me / Mind of Athena.” Athena was the war goddess who fought with her head, the strategist who could plan and outlast anything thrown at her without ever coming undone. Kai lets the sky fall and tells the sun it can kill the lights too, daring the whole apocalypse to do its worst while she just gets back up. Then she lands that title line, the heart of a soulmate paired with the mind of Athena, and you’ve got a woman who loves all the way in while running war-room calculations the entire time. That kind of woman can love deeply and still read every move before it lands. Terrifying. Delicious.
Real talk, the mind of Athena is the most attractive thing this song hands you. It’s the intelligence that keeps your face unreadable while you’re already six moves ahead, the kind of calm that reads a whole room before it’s done sitting down. Athena won by staying sharp after louder forces on the battlefield exhausted themselves. Kai’s claiming every inch of that for herself, and honestly I replayed this part four times because I want whatever she’s having.
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The second verse pulls the mask off the years she thought she threw away. “Too many times / I waited for others’ attention / Hoping they’d see my potential / ‘Cause I was blind / And all those times I thought / Were wasted / Made me who I am.” God, that one stung, the whole exhausting routine of standing in a fucking doorway hoping somebody finally picks you, and she owns her own part in it instead of pinning it on the people who walked past. Then comes the reframe that turns the song into a victory lap, the verdict that every supposedly wasted year was the thing that made her. The dead years were training. Every silence became Athena sharpening the blade in the dark. Some women come out of all that asking for an apology. She came out with a war education and a goddess’s mind, and that’s the better deal.
Kai Krilove writes like a woman who learned desire on the page before she ever took it to the mic. After years of poetry and short stories, she turned songwriting into another way to tell the truth with prettier lighting and more dangerous rhythm. A trained actor and dancer with pole and heels experience, plus jazz funk in her body, Kai brings performance into every fucking breath. Her silky vocals move through soulful vintage Pop R&B with European jazz in the bloodstream, pulling from the sultry precision of Sabrina Claudio and the velvet ache of Snoh Aalegra. With “Lately” and “Outrageous” both earning the R&B Genre John Lennon Songwriting Award in 2021/22, Kai sounds like elegance with a filthy little secret.
That work crisis last week, the one where I stayed calm while everyone around me came apart and couldn’t figure out where the hell that steadiness came from, this song is the answer I didn’t have in the moment. The presence I kept hunting for in other people’s faces had been living inside me the entire time, running the numbers and keeping me upright, building me into someone who could take the sky falling and get the fuck back up. Kai found hers and put a goddess’s name on it. Mine still doesn’t have a name, but she’s got the mind of Athena, and so do I.
