Mo Kenney to release debut album in May
Mo Kenney’s debut release established her as one of Canada’s most exciting up and coming artists. She has toured extensively with indie rock hero Joel Plaskett and The Emergency and Ron Sexsmith, selling record numbers of CDs offstage and gleaning outstanding reviews.
She has played the prestigious Iceland Airwaves Festival, The Great Escape, and Green Man Festival; won the 2013 SOCAN Songwriting Prize award; was nominated for a CBC Radio 3 Bucky Award for Rookie of the Year and an ECMA for Rising Star Recording of the Year; and made the iTunes Best Singer Songwriters of 2012 list. In 2013, she won a Canadian Folk Music Award for New/Emerging Artist of the Year; and three Music Nova Scotia awards for Pop Recording, New Artist Recording, and Female Artist Recording of the Year. Not bad eh?
The album is the happy outcome of a true tandem operation. “Joel and I are the only musicians playing on the album,” says Mo. “He definitely influenced the production. Joel is such a hard worker and he really knows his stuff.” Plaskett may still be best known as a prolific and popular Juno-winning rock and roll veteran, but his bona fides as a producer are now well established. Such acclaimed artists as Two Hours Traffic, Sarah Slean, and Steve Poltz have all made good use of his studio skills.
She may be just 23 years old, but Mo Kenney is far from being a novice songwriter. She began writing in her early teens, and by the age of 14, she’d already done some recording at a small studio in Bedford, Nova Scotia. Her musical tastes have undergone a transition over the past decade. Mo laughingly recalls a rock and roll phase as she entered her teens. “I was totally into Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Ozzy, all the classic rock stuff. When I started guitar I was really into the electric and I remember coffee houses at high school where I’d go onstage with my electric and just rip solos.” She also had a band in high school that she describes as “rather rock and roll, but a bit folky, too.”
Having influences and inspirations drawn from classic and alt-rock artists rather than the traditional singer/songwriter pantheon helps account for the bracing freshness of Mo Kenney’s style. Fitting her sound into a neat box is an exercise in futility, though, if pressed, Mo can settle for “pop music with a folky twist. It is pop-y as they’re often short and catchy little songs. I wanted to stay away from the typical singer/songwriter thing and do something a little different. These songs are like a collection of the music I have been carrying around since I was about 15. Many of the songs were written when I was younger, so the album is a weird mix.” More wonderful than weird, we say.
The album is out on May 12th 2014.