Considering she spends her week juggling reports, timesheets and other payroll-related duties, blending multiple musical tracks together simultaneously is something Acacia Hall admits now feels second nature.

And that’s a good thing because Hall, 31, by day a Climate Pledge Arena payroll specialist and off-hours a local DJ, singer and producer going by her “Kween Kaysh” alias at parties and festivals, has plenty happening at once. She got into administrative and payroll work out of college, but a burgeoning DJ hobby eventually led her to do that full-time before gliding back into an office day job with music as more of a side gig.

“Yes, they’re definitely different for sure,” Hall said. “When I tell people they’re like, ‘Huh?’ But I am a multi-faceted person, and I allow myself to embrace all the different things that I’m good at. In payroll, it’s one of those things where I know it like the back of my hand. I know it well and it’s a comfortable realm for me.

“And then with DJ’ing, I feel like that’s a part of the things that I’m passionate about, which is music and entertaining people and producing events. So, yeah, very different.”

Hall joined CPA in April 2024 after taking a year off from payroll work to handle a flurry of DJ opportunities. She’d spent prior months working payroll for a company producing Tesla batteries and two years before that for a construction management firm.

“Yes, those companies were in two different fields, for sure,” she said of her previous payroll employers. “The construction management job was in Bellevue, and it was more based around payroll for the labor done by construction workers. So, it was 1000% different from the (battery) manufacturing job mainly because I was just paying more of the management higher-ups.”

After the year away doing “strictly DJ work,” she missed the steadiness of her payroll career and wanted back in.

“It needed to be something for me that was just going to be transformative both personally and professionally,” she said. “I felt like Climate Pledge, with the mission and goals they had in mind, it really aligned with who I am, but also where I feel like I’m headed. I felt like I could learn a lot in this environment, and you always want to be in a place where you feel like you can grow.”

Hall identifies both as Black and Tlingit, a heritage passed by her maternal grandmother.

“I do love that the arena highlights different groups and people,” she said. “There’s a lot of diversity and inclusion in the environment there that I love. I’m a front-facing black woman, but people also don’t know that I’m Tlingit by blood. I’m registered (as a Tribe member) with the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska. My grandma passed away in 2016, and she was kind of the person to keep us connected to our culture. It’s a huge part of my life.”

The Seattle native and longtime Federal Way resident graduated with a Communications and Media Studies degree at Washington State University, where she’d had opportunities to curate her own show for a handful of radio stations in Pullman.

“I’ve always been passionate about music,” she said. “I grew up on classical, jazz and gospel, so music has always been a huge part of my life. So, it was kind of second nature to just get into DJ’ing. Nobody told me I’d be good at it; I just jumped into the field with confidence. I had expressed interest, and a friend bought me my first controller (a hardware device that sends commands to DJ software on a computer allowing them to mix music) to get me started. After that, it just took off.”

By 2017, it took off full-time for three years. During that period, she left a banking job in favor of part-time and contract work so she could focus on being a DJ and event curator.