Who is Hayley Kiyoko, where did she come from?

Hayley Kiyoko just released her first solo album on March 30 and has already found herself performing at Coachella. But where did she come from? Well, she appeared in the Disney Channel movie "Lemonade Mouth" as Stella Yamada in 2011 as well as "Scooby-Doo" and a few others and has been quietly making music since then. In 2015, she released a song titled "Girls Like Girls" and her career was thrust into the spotlight.

Where did this girl come from

Hayley was born in Los Angeles in 1991 and started dance lessons at a young age and has been acting in commercials and singing for most of her life.

She starred as Velma Dinkley in "Scooby-Doo! The Mystery Begins" and "Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster" before she found herself in "Lemonade Mouth" and various other roles. She was in a band called The Stunners that was an opening act for Justin Bieber's My World Tour. The band was scheduled to make a full album but that was canceled when they split up. In 2013 Hayley released her first EP titled "A Belle to Remember" and not long after began writing more material for the next EP that was titled "This Side of Paradise."

When "This Side of Paradise" released, the single titled "Girls Like Girls" caught a lot of attention as Hayley had never talked about her sexual orientation before this.

Following the single release, she co-directed the music video for the song and it went viral. Hayley was told to write songs about what scared her the most, and she said that at that time liking girls and being gay was what scared her the most. Now she just wants to normalize two girls in a music video falling in love or girls singing about liking a girl.

Fast forward to 2018 and Hayley is happy to sing songs about girls and proclaim her sexuality.

Her new album

The album that came out in March is titled "Expectations" and Hayley encourages her fans to listen to it from start to finish and not jump around in the order of the songs. When announcing her album, she made a declaration that caught many by surprise.

She declared that 2018 was now "twenty gay-teen" and many people went along with it. She got so much of a positive response that she started using it as a hashtag on her photos involving her upcoming album release on Instagram.

One thing that Hayley has been very vocal about was that she wanted to make music that she could relate to and by doing this, other women who date women would also have music that related to them. There are not many singers that sing about being gay and use pronouns in their songs that match their sexual orientation. But as people become more open and accepting towards the LGBTQ+ community, there are more and more singers willing to not only discuss their sexuality but sing about it as well.