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sinceileftyoublog · 4 years

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Little Kid Interview: Pry It Open

BY JORDAN MAINZER

A man comes home from work and finds his wife’s clothes strewn about on the floor. In that situation, most people with a healthy amount of pessimism would assume infidelity. The narrator in Little Kid songs assumes rapture. Indeed, Transfiguration Highway, the latest from the Toronto band fronted by singer-songwriter Kenny Boothby and their first for Solitaire Recordings, juxtaposes country-leaning, classic rock instrumentation with stories of people yearning, classically misguided, downtrodden, or lost. And unlike much of their previous material, the songs are tight and concise, circling with banjo, harmonica, and drums as opposed to minimal and drawn out guitar exercises, leaving Boothby’s words for maximum impact. Take “Thief On The Cross”, where Boothby not-so-secretly wishes other bands who they’ve known and made it big would take them along, revolving around a chugging guitar riff, banjo plucks, and celebratory bar-room piano. On the opposite emotional spectrum is “All Night (Golden Ring)”, a gentle duet between Boothby and multi-instrumentalist Megan Lunn, about another famous duet partnership, Tammy Wynette and George Jones, who eventually recorded purely for commercial reasons post-divorce and Jones’ abuse. Even Boothby’s sneering, whispered vocals on the title track effectively mirror the subtleties of his observations about the way his hometown had changed, as he logically muses along over a slinky bass line and 4/4 drum beat.

As much as he describes the characters like the one in “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured” as a joke, Boothby certainly uses the songs on Transfiguration Highway to process his own life. He grew up Christian and essentially learned how to play music through church, listening almost exclusively to Christian music till he was a teenager. Though gender and power dynamics play a role in the negative behavior of characters fake and real, like the idiot husband or Jones, Boothby’s analysis of the rest suggests a sort of hymnal reverence, or at least the possibility of goodness. The down-on-their-luck gamblers on the Whitney-esque “Losing” are treated with an exasperated smile. And on closer “Pry”, Boothby sings repeatedly, “I’ll pry it open,” not just referring to his heart but the gates of heaven. There’s room for ya if you’re kind.

I spoke with Boothby in late July about Transfiguration Highway, Christianity and Christian music, and his love-hate relationship with Bob Dylan. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: What is your current relationship with religion in general?

Kenny Boothby: I guess I wouldn’t be comfortable saying I’m a Christian, per se. I’m culturally Christian, if that makes sense. I was raised that way. But I wouldn’t say Jesus is my savoir or anything that would have to be on that checklist for a lot of people. It’s part of my history--I value it for a lot of reasons, but I wouldn’t be comfortable saying I’m a Christian in any way, really. It sticks around because I like the imagery and it shaped my worldview, for better or worse, in a lot of ways. It’s a complex relationship.

SILY: I know you’re influenced by Christian music--not what people think of, like contemporary Christian rock--but hymnals.

KB: I grew up listening to almost exclusively Christian music till I was a teen. Some of those bands still stick around and are important to me, but largely, it wasn’t a very artful group. Nowadays, even the ones I would still listen to wouldn’t meet the people’s requirements either, like Sufjan Stevens or early Pedro the Lion. That’s the closest thing that could be considered Christian music I still listen to. But I learned how to play music at church, so in a sense, there’s a Christian tradition of music that I’m part of in a way.

SILY: On the lead track on the album, “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured”, the character in the song, his first thought when he saw his wife’s clothes on the floor was not that she was having an affair but that she’d been raptured. Would you say this character is naive, and naive because of religion?

KB: Hmm...to me, the character’s made to be a bit of a joke to me. I view him as a stupid man. [laughs] Walking in and making these assumptions. Maybe he’s entitled and out of touch with the relationship himself, like some of the things he lists about the relationship and why he should have gotten to heaven. So, naive, but also arrogant. I connect it to religion, but it wasn’t meant to be a send-up of Christianity, almost more of a gender-based thing. This is a man who is so unaware of his wife’s needs and that she’s looking for attention elsewhere that his first thought is he’s done everything right. But I guess it could come across that way.

SILY: I love the moment where he comes in and sees a crucifix above the bed, and thinks, “As I watched, his limbs were spreading out,” and the two people intertwined in bed also have limbs spreading out. It’s like this is the moment where his innocence, or whatever was blocking him from realizing what was going on, was lost.

KB: That makes sense. I often write songs kind of quick--it feels like a very long process, but often, the active time I’m sitting there writing is kind of short. That day, especially, was less than an hour of sitting there and assembling words. Some of it is not as intentional as it may seem, but when you say that, I’m like, “Cool, right on!” It’s interesting what the subconscious mind can whip up sometimes.

SILY: This record more so than anything else you’ve made sounds bigger. Why did you make that choice at this time in the existence of the band? Did it have to do with signing to a new label?

KB: When we made it, we didn’t have a label or anything attached to it. The process was the same, though we had access to a tape machine for the first time and could record live to tape. Artistically, it’s sort of the logical next step for us. But Dan [Rutman] from Solitaire, I’d been in touch with him for a while because my friend [Brigitte] Naggar from Common Holly is on the label. I knew he was kind of interested. I got the sense he wasn’t super into it at first but maybe he needed it to grow in on him. After the label decision, we did decide on a grander roll-out with visualizers and that sort of thing, because that’s on the label’s side. That’s Dan’s expertise: How do we get people hyped on this more. Before, we were like, “Let’s do a post on every social media saying, ‘Hey, this’ll be out in a month.’” And then a month later, we’d put it out. There wasn’t much thought to it. Anything that’s grander is more on the PR front: label expertise, money being paid to publicists. It comes across as more of a grand thing, and that’s cool and what we were hoping to get out of the label. To have more people hear it. The process for making the album was more or less the same--what was bigger was the social media and the storytelling to entice people to listen.

SILY: What was the inspiration behind the sequencing of the record?

KB: That’s something we always take a long time thinking about and noticing during recording, like, “That’ll be a good first song,” or, “That could be a closer.” It’s something we start to agree on pretty early. But then when you pick the track list, it can be really difficult. This one was hard to sequence. I think it was the last day of recording at [bassist Paul Vroom’s] old place, The Pharmacy, and me and Meg sat down, and I wrote down the titles of the songs on an old piece of paper. I took a sharpie and was writing the key for each song on there as well. Some of them ended on a different key, so I was thinking about the circle of fifths. There were some that didn’t work well that way, but there were some that ended abruptly enough that the key could change and it felt okay still. I approached it that way and then showed it to Meg, and she recommended switching two of them or something, and then we both looked at it and thought, “That seems pretty good.” We showed it to the rest of the band, and everybody kind of agreed that it worked.

Another funny detail: I wrote the keys on each one, but then I also put a cowboy hat on top of the ones that had kind of a twang to them, and I think I was trying to spread the twang evenly across the album.

SILY: Does “I Thought That You’d Been Raptured” segue into “What’s In A Name”?

KB: It does. That’s not necessarily a planned thing, but I noticed [the former] landed on an “A” chord and the other song starts with an “A” chord. It worked musically and was an interesting second track.

SILY: There’s a nice level of variation from track-to-track, from aesthetic to time signature to lyrical themes. And then the couple short tracks, “Candle Out” and “Gill”, are nice breaks.

KB: That’s kind of different for us. We often have very long songs. This album has some of our shortest ones: The average track length is probably three-and-a-half minutes, maybe 4, which is almost a normal song length. Those really short ones are new for us. “Candle Out” was a musical idea I had, and it was just about all you could do with the idea, and “Gill” was just an instrumental that I wrote about my friend who passed away. The day of her funeral I was playing and I came up with it. But yeah, we were kind of kicking around with them, trying to figure out what to do with them. “Candle Out” seemed like a good closer for the side, and we thought about opening a side with it, too. Definitely, they’re breathers and sequenced accordingly to be in a similar spot in the track list on both sides.

SILY: “Gill” precedes the longest track on the album, “Pry”, that fits more with your past material. “Pry” almost seems to be not the emotional climax in terms of the narrative but the peak of emotional feeling on the record.

KB: It’s probably the most sincere song on there, and maybe the most personal, to be honest. More than usual, there’s storytelling on this one, but that one was a feelings song. The lyrics are fairly simple in the effect that they’re not building on each other like a story, but maybe they’re harder to decipher for that reason. It’s the simplest in a lot of ways, but I feel strongly about it in a different way I do something like “Rapture” for sure.

SILY: The repetition of the lyrics definitely mirrors the repetition of a lot of the chords.

KB: It’s a two-chorder, for sure. There’s a little twist at the end, some surprise chords, but it’s mostly these two. It’s something I used to do a lot more often, but we’re getting really into the fucky chords these days.

SILY: Were there any newfound instrumental influences on this record?

KB: That’s a good question. The most obvious touch point when you turn the record on is Bob Dylan. I have kind of a love/hate relationship with Bob Dylan--I feel strongly for him, and I mostly love him, for years now. If you know that, there are lyrical hints or subtitles in other songs that are based on Bob Dylan. He’s been an influence, though I don’t know if I’ve ever really sounded like him before. “Losing” is a traditional Canadian, Neil Young/The Band kind of vibe. That one was written, I had the piano line for a while and was picturing a soft country rock kind of song. That day, it was [electric guitarist/drummer Brodie Germain], Paul, and I, and I showed them the song. We did the initial guitar, bass, and drums all together. Brodie was the right drummer to be on that one since he was raised on classic rock and Neil Young. We felt, “That’s nice we have a song that has that kind of feel,” because if we’re together, we’re having some beers and it always ends up we’re listening to some Neil Young song and talking about how just slow enough the drum beat is. The piano was new. I was basing so much around the piano. Every song has some, and some are centered around it, but I’m not sure where that influence came from other than I’ve been playing my piano a lot more.

SILY: The Dylan influence is an interesting one, because in his music, he has the same relationship with religion or religious allusions that you do.

KB: That’s something that connects me with him for sure. His Christian records are terrible--I can’t listen to them--but I have really low tolerance for 1980′s music and the production at that time. I think those are late 70′s, but he was just starting to get to that shiny sound. And the lyrics are just fucking brutal on them too. When he went full Christian, that was a really bad scene. All my favorite records of his are in the first six or seven, and they do have a lot of little references. “Highway 61 Revisited”, the song, is a big influence.

SILY: Have you heard the new releases from Dylan and Neil Young?

KB: I’ve listened to the Dylan one just once. I liked it okay. I was enjoying the music of it, thinking it was produced in a fairly tasteful way for his more recent stuff, and the playing on it was great. Some of the lyrics were good, some were kind of garbage. I really don’t like really direct rhymes, like if you rhyme “truck” with “duck”. When it’s a full-on rhyme, I’m cringing, to be honest. Some of Dylan’s rhymes, I just know what he’s gonna say next, and it pisses me off. Like it’s too obvious...Here I am criticizing Bob Dylan’s lyrics. I’m not trying to do that. But a lot of them on this album I was cringing at.

The newly unearthed Neil Young album [Homegrown] of course is pretty cool. I like his records from right around that time a lot, so it’s cool to have another piece from that time in his career. I kind of see why it was shelved, though. It’s not as strong as some of those. But there’s some cool stuff. I actually really like the weird one with the glass, and he’s telling a story, and somebody’s sliding their finger around a glass. It’s really strange. I appreciate that’s in there for sure.

SILY: Did you have live dates that were affected by the pandemic?

KB: The only ones we had set in stone were from the release weekend. We were gonna be playing in Toronto and Montreal and Kingston, all within a pretty short drive within Canada. In September, we started the process of booking a tour, which is now of course not happening. It’s a bummer since we never really toured before, and I made the decision that I would more seriously be a musician this year for at least the next few years as opposed to having to take time off to do tours and stuff. Nature had another plan, so to speak, and now I can’t do that. [laughs] It’s frustrating, but mostly, I missed the release shows quite a bit. There’s always that date on the horizon for a long time, and the celebration of it is the show, and the catharsis happens there and I feel free of the album after that show. But there are a lot of other musicians for whom it’s been more painful financially and otherwise.

SILY: Have you considered doing a live stream from a socially distant venue or your practice space?

KB: That would be really cool. We were trying to get this grant to do a distant concert film. I don’t think we got it since we haven’t heard back. But when it’s safe for us as a band to get together or when we all feel comfortable, it would be cool to try. Like a Radiohead [In Rainbows - From the Basement] kind of vibe. I’m hoping we could have other songs finished. Maybe when shows are back we could play the album through.

SILY: What else is next for you?

KB: In December, Brodie was here. In November, he played a few shows with us. He moved away to the UK but was back for about a month and a half. We thought, “He’s here, let’s record some stuff.” We recorded six or seven songs. Some of them are super long, some of our longest, so we almost have enough for a record already, but we aren’t sure they’re all keepers. Mostly, I have to write a lot of lyrics to flesh it out, and that hasn’t been flowing too much. I’ve written a couple in a couple months. In this next month, I’m off work for a month, so I should more seriously write some stuff. Hopefully we have an album done in the fall.

SILY: Is there anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s notable?

KB: I’ve been listening to the album DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar really consistently for the last four months or so. I’ve just been digging into that one, seeming to get more into it every time: the lyrics, the depth of the album is really sinking in for the first time for some reason, though I liked it when it came out. As far as newer records, I like the Phoebe Bridgers record a lot, and Tenci’s My Heart Is An Open Field, and Empty Country, the guy from Cymbals Eat Guitars’ solo album I’ve been digging a lot. Lately, because I’ve been working, I’ve been listening to a lot of mellow stuff that I feel like I could do in the background: Emily Yacina, Advance Base. That’s fairly routine stuff for me. Those are all kind of #kennycore kind of records. I think I’m looking for that comfort in these weird times.

SILY: Would you call Little Kid #kennycore?

KB: [laughs] I hope so. That’s the goal. Make it sound like something I would like to listen to.

Transfiguration Highway by Little Kid

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