Out of the Darkness, Madeline Kenney Writes Her Own Reality

When you ask Madeline Kenney how she’s doing, she doesn’t bullshit you. The blunt-banged, soft-spoken songstress is known for her gut-punch lyrics and emotive melodies, so it feels like a logical start to our interview when she answers my nicety with an honest, clear-eyed description of what she calls her “June gloom.” “It’s not summery at all,” she shrugs kindly. “It’s supposed to be summer, but it’s so gray.” Kenney’s in her garden, fiddling with her AirPods while she reclines on a small, wobbly hammock. She points out the spots in the lawn that are overgrown with weeds, but not without affection, swinging rhythmically back and forth as a grayed-out sky lurches above her. It’s gloomy where I am, too, though with a more sinister twist: The aestival New York City air has been blotted out by plumes of wildfire smoke from up north, forcing us inside as the sky sears orange. I catch a glimpse of the setting on my Zoom screen; it looks like I’m calling in from a Mad Max sequel set in Yorkville.

If anyone can understand the suffocation suspended around me, it’s Madeline Kenney. This latest phase of her creative career—marked by 2021’s Summer Quarter EP—has risen largely out of the pandemic, refracting off of the bevy of internal metamorphoses she was pushed into headlong when the world shut off for those interminable months. She fashioned the songs alone in her tiny subterranean studio, which she ducks into to show me with a quick phone swivel. The suburbia around her is calm and muted, all soft greens and muffled browns. It stands in sharp contrast to A New Reality Mind’s album cover, where golden tulle and burning blue sky halo her while she stares defiantly down at a cameraman who, I can only assume, cowers in her very presence. On our call, Kenney has the sort of kind, unassuming affectation you hope an idolic indie maven might—and the gentleness of her aura only extends as we keep chatting. She was a kindergarten teacher during the pandemic, and she still teaches one of the kids piano. She’s scared of butterflies and moths, but she likes caterpillars. She has cats. She calls herself lazy, but she produces and writes everything by herself in her basement.

But she’s not “soft,” per se, and she won’t be boxed in. We talk about the resurgence of Sad Lady Acoustic Music in the last few years (which, full disclaimer, is some of my favorite music as a self-identified Sometime-Sad Lady) and the way it’s threatened to box in women and non-binary musicians. “I think that humans are meaning-seeking creatures and categorizing is very natural,” Kenney notes, smiling. “I just really don’t want to be on these, like, Spotify ‘badass women’ playlists.” It’s not the music she listens to, and it’s not the music she’s trying to make. There’s 1,200 terms on the Spotify list of genres—she doesn’t want to have to choose one to define the work she’s done.

I’m not sure it’s possible to do, anyways. A New Reality Mind, Kenney’s fourth LP, is a multivalent smorgasbord of soaring horns, ‘80s synth lines and lilting lyric witticisms. Kenney’s been shifting focus, breaking out of the acoustic indie mold she once built around herself. In 2020, she released Sucker’s Lunch to critical acclaim and twiddled about on the instruments she now had time to dive fully into. She swept most of those musical doodles aside as she burrowed her way out of the heavy silence of the pandemic—until her relationship ended, and she found herself more alone than she thought she’d be as the world sputtered back to life. Ironically, only then did she enter the self-imposed exile A New Reality Mind would emerge from. “I got broken up with and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I used to write an album a year and do a ton of shit all the time.’ I kind of got reignited and finished everything really fast,” she explains, as she traipses through her Oakland home, her phone jostling lightly in her hand. “It was very insular. It’s not a very romantic process.”

Piecing herself back together after her breakup, the lyrics she’d written in the last years started to make sense. “As my relationship came to an end and I started looking back over these songs, I was like, ‘That’s what I was trying to say.’ In a horrible way, I guess these all do fit together,” she says, laughing quietly. Kenney had felt stagnant during the pandemic, devoid of the sensory input she thought was necessary to her own creative spark. But, as it turned out, she had been writing about the world around her—it was just a smaller, more fractured world than she’d realized at first. The album is broad and far-spanning but, in Kenney’s deftly-woven musical imagination, also quite cohesive—if not sonically, at least in the way its brushstrokes paint a life she hadn’t yet known she was living. She ended up on a tight deadline and an even tighter budget, and she used them to re-focus herself toward the sonic purpose she’d lost sight of two springs ago. “When you work within constraints, you can make cool stuff,” she muses, as she shows me the hodgepodge of instruments she enlisted friends to play—you can thank one of them for those killer horn sections.

Actually, give Kenney’s dad some credit, too. It was her father who pushed for instrumental tweaks to the album that were inspired by his favorite “‘80s corn-soaked music.” I laugh until she pulls up her shirt sleeve to reveal a fresh Steely Dan tattoo blazing proudly on her upper arm—one point for dad rock! It tracks. Look to the sparkling lead single “I Drew A Line” for Laurie Anderson-esque electronica and plenty of jazz saxophone, or to the richly patterned “It Carries On” and “Plain Boring Disaster” for a borderline-orchestral mix of distorted, delicious instrumental solos. A New Reality Mind basks in its own sonic textures, an enormous leap forward for Kenney—no matter how much she downplays it for me. She’s leaning more into the sounds she grew up with, the ones that captivate her: the softly arpeggiating synths and classically-inspired piano, the bits and pieces she grasps onto to make her music that much more undefinable. Asked of her musical influence, she really does struggle to spell it out. “Ladies doing weird stuff,” she cheekily explains.

Madeline Kenney’s refusal—or, perhaps, inability—to self-define reads as thoughtful, not withholding. She’s still figuring it out herself. “Life is boredom until you die,” she notes of her self-expressive modes. “We have to deal with this everyday boredom. How are we going to fill our time? That can be a dark thing, for sure, but it can also make me pursue a million things.” She really has constructed a new reality for herself in the last few years, a way of making grocery shopping and doomed relationships and endless lonely evenings point toward something much more magical. “Do I want to come up with a solution?” she questions. “That’s not what I’m seeking. It’s just an acknowledgment of the weirdness.”

That’s what the album’s about, if it’s about anything: not changing her life, exactly, but reframing it in a way that sparkles a bit more in the sun. When she’s really down, Kenney calls her grandmother, a 93-year old Buddhist with a sweet old-lady affectation she mimics on the phone. “Things can feel so heavy and hard,” she remembers thinking after a particularly heavy call with her nana, “But, they’re also ridiculous and light and silly.” There’s Madeline Kenney’s new reality mind—and it’s a beautiful one to step inside.

Watch Madeline Kenney’s Paste studio session from 2018 here.

Miranda Wollen is Paste‘s music intern. She lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.