The signal is spotty when I talk to Madeline Kenney, who’s calling from the road on the way to her show at The Independent in San Francisco. She’s on tour for her latest album Kiss From the Balcony, which was recorded in Oakland. The record is a tangle of all the ways of being in womanhood, reflected through the ways Kenney uses her voice and the way melodies shift from one track to another. Kiss From the Balcony is a collaboration between Kenney and musicians Ben Sloan and Stephen Patota, which came about when they were on tour for her last album.”I hope people come out to the shows mostly because my band mates are so frigging talented. It's scary. They're scaring people every night in a good way,” she says.
Read more about what Kenney had to say about the album and the process of getting to record it in her home town.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
TL: What has it been like bringing the songs from the album to life on tour?
MK: It has been really fun. We all live in different cities, so it’s kind of wild to bring them together and learn all the parts in a couple days and immediately take it on tour. But it's a healthy pause to the other parts of our lives to get to do this
TL: Can you talk about how the songs and the album came together out of this collaboration and when you knew that what you had was going to become an album?
MK: Well, a lot of the songs just existed as half songs and just pieces on my computer and ideas that were not completed. I went on tour for my last album, A New Reality Mind, and Ben Sloan's band opened up for me on tour on the East Coast leg. And Stephen [Patota] was in that band too.
We just had so much fun playing together that we just were like, we should keep doing this in some way. Then one day I sent a song and was like, we should do something with this. And then it sort of turned into an EP or at least, writing a few songs to become an EP. So yeah, it started off very playful and natural and then kind of all of a sudden we ended up with an album. So that was cool.
TL: What was it like recording here in Oakland? How much does the location, the sense of place, and even Oakland for you as a musician, influence your writing, your feelings, the sound, the process?
MK: That's a great question. I think Oakland has been for many years a place very welcoming to experimentation in art. So I think that the culture of the city itself encourages that. And then I also think Tiny Telephone is a place where you're not gonna find this sort of uppity, patriarchal, old school style of engineering and recording.
It's a lot more playful and welcoming, I think. So being in that specific studio, it just felt like we could just run around like it was a playground, and Danielle, our engineer, was so game.
And then, I think, also just, I could go home to my cats at night. I'm in my hometown; it's very relaxed. I didn't feel the pressure of going to maybe a residency or something and having to create something. It's easy to make things in the place where you live, I guess.
TL: Speaking to the playfulness that you're speaking about, I think it really does come across in this album. And I was thinking it's one of my favorite sort of genres–I call it “weird girl music.”
MK: Okay, love it.
TL: Yeah, like the Regina Spektor, Aldous Harding type stuff. But also speaking to the ways that your voice does so many different things, it feels playful. There's so many different ways that it comes across, almost like different characters. How did you evolve with your voice and realizing that you can do all these different things with it?
MK: Thank you so much for noticing that. I mean, I think anything I was gonna say is, anybody who has toured with me knows that I have too many stupid voices and accents and just dumb stuff to try and keep everybody entertained. So I think that's always been part of just me.
But I also think that happens when I don't have to be so wrapped up and concerned in the execution of difficult parts. Because I think a lot of times I would come up with a melody or have an idea but I just can't play guitar as good as Stephen. So he would just take the idea and do it way better. And so I think when somebody else is like, 'okay, don't worry, I've got this part of the arrangement,' I think it psychologically freed me up to just have fun singing and performing.
And I am really interested in storytelling almost in a theatrical way that adds to the lyric content. I think for these types of arrangements, it's fun to just lean way, way, way far in and see how far you can take it.
TL: I appreciate hearing what it means to be able to be musically free, both in the context of the safety of the recording space you were in and also the safety of, like you said, working with someone who's like, 'I've got this.' It feels like it also comes across in the ways that the music then gets to be what it is because of that.
MK: Yeah, and I think also, you know, it's my fifth record and I'm pretty disillusioned with the industry anyway, so it's like I feel that I have very little to lose by being a freak, you know?
It's interesting when I was getting ready to put this out, the label and press people were asking me to make a one sheet that was like, what's the capital T theme of the record, you know? And like the honest truth is like, there's no theme to the record. These are just songs that I happened to be working on near the same time. I think there's thematic throughcurrents because it's all coming from my brain. So it's gonna be related to my life experience in this moment in my life.
TL: Where I think that it relates is the different use of the voice and different layers or versions of womanhood that you experience. All the different versions of yourself that you can be in one day, or one moment, or one stretch of time–connecting that experience with the different voices on the record.
MK: That's a really good point. Yeah, because obviously there's a performative element to fulfilling your role as a woman in society. And then there's, literally, the performative element of doing these weird, exaggerated voices on the record. So, you know, I might have to take your analysis and run with it. Maybe I'll tell people that's the meaning now. [laughs].
Kiss From the Balcony is out now on Bandcamp and streaming platforms.
