{"id":9651,"date":"2014-11-07T17:19:04","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T17:19:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=9651"},"modified":"2014-11-07T17:19:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-07T17:19:04","slug":"mo-kenney-nova-scotia-guitar-slinger-cant-stop-wont-stop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2014\/11\/07\/mo-kenney-nova-scotia-guitar-slinger-cant-stop-wont-stop\/","title":{"rendered":"Mo Kenney :: Nova Scotia guitar slinger can\u2019t stop, won\u2019t stop"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mo<\/a><\/p>\n

by Matt Williams<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a late October, rainy blue Monday afternoon and Mo Kenney is sipping butternut squash soup and a glass of Amsterdam Blonde in Toronto\u2019s Kensington Market. It\u2019s the first chance she\u2019s 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\u2019s been to Exclaim! Magazine, Global Toronto, Music Canada, and The Verge. In just a couple hours, she\u2019ll fly back to Nova Scotia where she\u2019s doing a hometown set for Halifax Pop Explosion the nextday, making her visit to the Big Smoke just less than 24 hours. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI need to be doing shit all the time,\u201d Kenney says. \u201cI can\u2019t work a nine to five job and just be a normal person. It\u2019s so boring. It sucks. What\u2019s 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\u2019s why people do renovations on their houses or buy new furniture.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cTowards 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,\u201d she says with a laugh.<\/p>\n

Home is in Dartmouth \u2014 \u201cDark Side,\u201d to Haligonians, due to its \u201csketchy\u201d reputation \u2014 where Kenney recently moved with her artist girlfriend to a place they\u2019ve filled with a mess of \u201cart shit everywhere and guitars everywhere.\u201d She uses her neighbourhood bar, Jacob\u2019s Lounge, as an ad hoc rehearsal space, playing impromptu shows sometimes with Dave Marsh and The True Love Rules (\u201che\u2019s fuckin\u2019 awesome\u201d).<\/p>\n

Dartmouth isn\u2019t as big or as popular as Halifax, and there\u2019s no shortage of raised eyebrows when she tells people where she lives. Even though she loves its rough appeal, she\u2019s happy \u201cthey just tore down the crack houses next door.\u201d She\u2019s just not ready for total gentrification, expressing concern it will one day go the way of North End Halifax, with its \u201ctrendy bars and craft beer.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat 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\u2019t happen anytime soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

In My Dreams<\/em>, her latest full-length<\/a>, is a lot like Kenney\u2019s Dartmouth, and if we\u2019re lucky that trend won\u2019t end anytime soon either. It\u2019s dark and stormy, with rays of light here and there. It\u2019s devoid of gimmick, relying on old-school six-string wizardry and razor-sharp, perfectionist songwriting. But its most endearing trait might be Kenney\u2019s \u2018no bullshit\u2019 attitude, which makes the 24-year-old\u2019s rage, apathy, loneliness, vulnerability, and love or lack of it shine clear through her lyrics and delivery.<\/p>\n

Like most people who come from or choose to live in tough or \u201csketchy\u201d places, Kenney is tough, too. She stopped drinking hard liquor because, \u201cI go off the rails… like I\u2019m a fuckin\u2019 wild animal.\u201d Her drink of choice was coke and Bacardi 151, which she says has likely \u201cpickled\u201d 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 \u201capartment is pristine.\u201d She looks tough. She\u2019s calm, cool, and collected enough to convince you she\u2019s seen and done some shit, and can handle herself in any situation.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cEspecially when you\u2019re a teenager, it just makes you feel less alone, when you can relate to music, and you find something you can invest in,\u201d she says. Kenney picked up a guitar at 11 and never looked back. By 14 or 15, she was writing \u201cshitty songs,\u201d but pushed on, feeling like a \u201cmad scientist\u201d creating things in her room that she thought were genuinely good. Now, whether it\u2019s a coping mechanism or just simply expressing herself, she can\u2019t stop making music.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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\u2019t really understand just from thinking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has a particularly close relationship with Elliott Smith\u2019s records, citing his own \u201cIndependence Day\u201d 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\u2019s albums on her MP3 player for company. Now, whenever she hears the song, it brings her back to that summer.<\/p>\n

\u201c[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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t even register with them. That quality is a mutation: normal people don\u2019t pursue their passions relentlessly. Normal people don\u2019t take the road less traveled. Normal people play it safe. It\u2019s another thing about Kenney that just isn\u2019t normal.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re doing something you\u2019re not passionate about, you\u2019re just going to end up at a dead end at some point and be miserable. So you might as well just take the risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Matt Williams It\u2019s a late October, rainy blue Monday afternoon and Mo Kenney is sipping butternut squash soup and a glass of Amsterdam Blonde in Toronto\u2019s Kensington Market. It\u2019s the first chance she\u2019s had to catch her breath since landing late Sunday night, throwing some new strings on her beautiful old Hensel Parlor acoustic, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}