by Matt Williams
It’s a late October, rainy blue Monday afternoon and Mo Kenney is sipping butternut squash soup and a glass of Amsterdam Blonde in Toronto’s Kensington Market. It’s the first chance she’s had to catch her breath since landing late Sunday night, throwing some new strings on her beautiful old Hensel Parlor acoustic, and falling into bed. Since she woke up this morning, she’s been to Exclaim! Magazine, Global Toronto, Music Canada, and The Verge. In just a couple hours, she’ll fly back to Nova Scotia where she’s doing a hometown set for Halifax Pop Explosion the nextday, making her visit to the Big Smoke just less than 24 hours. It’s the type ofschedule sure to make the average person tired, flustered, irritable, or any number of unpleasant dispositions. But Mo Kenney is not the average person.
“I need to be doing shit all the time,” Kenney says. “I can’t work a nine to five job and just be a normal person. It’s so boring. It sucks. What’s the point of that? Why do people do that with their lives? Like I wonder if the thought even crosses their minds, normal people who do normal people things. I guess that’s why people do renovations on their houses or buy new furniture.”
In fact, one gets the feeling she might cease to exist if she stops writing and playing, the same way some sharks need to keep swimming to stay alive. Fresh off a pretty extensive European tour, rest and relaxation seem to be more like necessary evils than things to look forward to.
“Towards the end of the touring schedule for the first record I was starting to get pretty tired just from being on the road all the time. But then I had a bit of a break this summer, and it was enough for me to get sick of being home,” she says with a laugh.
Home is in Dartmouth — “Dark Side,” to Haligonians, due to its “sketchy” reputation — where Kenney recently moved with her artist girlfriend to a place they’ve filled with a mess of “art shit everywhere and guitars everywhere.” She uses her neighbourhood bar, Jacob’s Lounge, as an ad hoc rehearsal space, playing impromptu shows sometimes with Dave Marsh and The True Love Rules (“he’s fuckin’ awesome”).
Dartmouth isn’t as big or as popular as Halifax, and there’s no shortage of raised eyebrows when she tells people where she lives. Even though she loves its rough appeal, she’s happy “they just tore down the crack houses next door.” She’s just not ready for total gentrification, expressing concern it will one day go the way of North End Halifax, with its “trendy bars and craft beer.”
“That will probably happen eventually, I know it will. [Dartmouth is] so cool right now, though. I love how sketchy it is. I hope it doesn’t happen anytime soon.”
In My Dreams, her latest full-length, is a lot like Kenney’s Dartmouth, and if we’re lucky that trend won’t end anytime soon either. It’s dark and stormy, with rays of light here and there. It’s devoid of gimmick, relying on old-school six-string wizardry and razor-sharp, perfectionist songwriting. But its most endearing trait might be Kenney’s ‘no bullshit’ attitude, which makes the 24-year-old’s rage, apathy, loneliness, vulnerability, and love or lack of it shine clear through her lyrics and delivery.
Like most people who come from or choose to live in tough or “sketchy” places, Kenney is tough, too. She stopped drinking hard liquor because, “I go off the rails… like I’m a fuckin’ wild animal.” Her drink of choice was coke and Bacardi 151, which she says has likely “pickled” her insides. While searching for a vintage leather motorcycle jacket, she describes a night she was woken by a friend who found her passed out on a curb, one whole side of her face a giant bruise, claiming she might look terrible but her “apartment is pristine.” She looks tough. She’s calm, cool, and collected enough to convince you she’s seen and done some shit, and can handle herself in any situation.
Some of this hardness might come from her past as a self-described troubled teenager. Music became a safe haven, an outlet that helped her escape whatever she was dealing with, or deal with it head on.
“Especially when you’re a teenager, it just makes you feel less alone, when you can relate to music, and you find something you can invest in,” she says. Kenney picked up a guitar at 11 and never looked back. By 14 or 15, she was writing “shitty songs,” but pushed on, feeling like a “mad scientist” creating things in her room that she thought were genuinely good. Now, whether it’s a coping mechanism or just simply expressing herself, she can’t stop making music.
“I just have to. The reason why I started writing in the first place was to make sense of myself and my thoughts and stuff like that. It really helps to write things down and work them out when you can’t really understand just from thinking about it.”
She has a particularly close relationship with Elliott Smith’s records, citing his own “Independence Day” as an example of the kind of song that burns music on to memory. She remembers sitting in her room as a teenager sulking, staring out the window, with just a collection of Smith’s albums on her MP3 player for company. Now, whenever she hears the song, it brings her back to that summer.
“[Elliott Smith] said it best, that a song is just basically a moment in time, like a picture with words. It stays the same forever. You can replay it over and over again and replay where you were at the time. It takes on a different meaning to every single person who listens to it.”
Smith is one of those musicians who connected, and still connects deeply with people as a result of his decision to take chances, to be vulnerable, and to share himself, warts and all, in an effort to reach into the darkness to touch someone, and be touched back. Like Kenney, those decisions were born out of necessity. An alternative existence, one where they chose a different path, doesn’t even register with them. That quality is a mutation: normal people don’t pursue their passions relentlessly. Normal people don’t take the road less traveled. Normal people play it safe. It’s another thing about Kenney that just isn’t normal.
“If you’re doing something you’re not passionate about, you’re just going to end up at a dead end at some point and be miserable. So you might as well just take the risk.”
Mo Kenney will be at The Park Theatre on Nov. 12 with Kim Churchill. Tickets are $22 plus fees at the Winnipeg Folk Festival Music Store and Ticketmaster.