About
“My hero’s back,” Madeline Kenney sings on the second track of her newest effort, Kiss from the Balcony. In a sense, she means herself; made with friends Ben Sloan and Stephen Patota across just a few in-person studio sessions in Oakland, these tracks represent a culmination of Madeline’s musings on growth and resilience reaching back years, brought to life through this generative and vibrant collaboration. Close listeners can hear the breadth of stylistic elements and themes carried through from various eras of her work, which all come together in a cohesive and timeless record.
In two week-long intensive sessions, the three collaborators grew these nine songs from fragments, sketches, and seeds. With a background in experimental percussion and sound design, Ben Sloan brings an electronic sound to Kenney’s writing; Stephen Patota provides ingenious guitar melodies throughout and grounds the project in acoustic elements. Kiss from the Balcony was originally intended to be an EP, but the sessions brought forth such fruitful ideation and play that the project was expanded to a full length album. It sits in Madeline’s discography as a thematic and musical progression that sees her iterate on ideas about love and explore new sonic motifs through her work with Patota and Sloan. Of the collaboration, Kenney says, “Ben and Stephen took the songs to heights they simply never would have reached if they stayed in my basement studio–A New Reality Mind reached the basement’s capacity, and these ideas deserved an expansion unique to a trusting creative relationship.”
Much of Kiss from the Balcony is a meditation on modern relationships, a feminist and utterly human contemplation of power and who holds it. “Hereditary backward leaning,” she describes in ‘Slap,’ of the female condition; “But no-one ever likes to see the girls break down / So they keep it to the bathroom floor” she sings in the rapturous opener, ‘Scoop.’ While the songs are shrouded in metaphor, the ubiquity of heartbreak and resilience decode much of the internal conflict Kenney depicts. The album sees her recognize the precarity and peculiarity of life and take it by the horns, realizing she controls her own narrative: “I have done a lot of healing work in the last few years. I trust myself and the world a little more every day.” In this way, Kiss from the Balcony seems to reach back towards her earlier work, offering a gentle hand to a questioning, aching version of herself–she finds the ability to love again and again. “I don’t feel the need to turn my songs into my diary,” she says, “These songs feel more like miniature meditations on small moments.”
She explores the relationships between joy and suffering, choosing to see them as inseparable, two sides of a single coin. “It’s never over / When will they love me?” Kenney asks on ‘They Go Wide,’ describing her positionality both as a woman in relationship and as an indie artist in the modern music industry. She says of single ‘All I Need,’ “I think a good love song has to include something about feeling like the only ones in the world who get it. I like to think of the kiss from the balcony as the totally wild and foolhardy desire to love, to love within a broken if not crumbling world, to blow a kiss to the universe, despite it all.” A playful hopefulness pervades the record, providing a sense of revelation in the journey throughout, Kenney’s radical acceptance of life as it is like a lyrical tongue out at the absurd.
Her new single “All I Need” is out now, listen to the single & watch the video here.
