Canadian born, NYC based Kate Fenner has released her third solo Album, “Middle Voice” in November 2017. Fenner recorded it with long-time musical collaborator Tony Scherr. Musical contributors to the recording include Bill Frisell, Jason Moran, Norah Jones, Chris Brown, and Tony Scherr. The album is about passage: of time and emotion, of life from one stage into another… and ultimately beyond knowing into feeling. Fenner’s rich voice navigates ecstatic and tragic thresholds, encountering what we may keep and what we need to put down throughout.

After listening to the whole track list I’ve got that well known a bit weary & nostalgic feeling of realizing very important wisdom. Kate’s music is mature and makes you think about life’s turns, ups and downs. Her melody lets us stare in our own personal solitude moments, tells us a story we comprehend per our conjunctures. Experience has yielded both wisdom and disappointment – “from the romance that drove her to the stormy bluff, where the ocean itself wouldn’t be enough”  in the opening verse of This Divorce let’s us know there was no other way through. Part of the majesty of Kate’s voice has always been its absoluteness.

Fenner documents tending to life while keeping “one eye on the city lights..” The song holds the listener on a constant pivot, with surrender and yearning in the balance. In fact, the album keeps pivoting us; from stage to domesticity, from abandon to acknowledgement, from youth to experience and from wanting to grace. The album gives ultimately is the opportunity to grow in one’s skin, to adopt and adapt, to fail and to learn, and to not have to hide from yesterday or tomorrow.

Kate Fenner’s singing career began as a girl in Canada, touring and recording for two decades before raising her family in NYC. Her voice can be heard on dozens of collaborations with the above mentioned artists, and many others, as well as three solo albums and ongoing projects with the iconic Joan Jonas. The peculiar moment with this album is that she started recording it when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She did the whole job together with Tony Scherr in three weeks in short 3h sessions. After surgery and healing she did some overdubs and added up new songs which make this album very personal.

Her voice is being described as “lusty, alternative, Joni Mitchell-ish sound” She was one of the primary singers and songwriters for the Canadian alternative rock band Bourbon Tabernacle Choir in the 1980s and 1990s. After they separated, Fenner continued performing as a duo with her former Bourbon bandmate Chris Brown. In 2000, she toured and sang with Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip on the “Music @ Work” tour. In 2003 Fenner released a solo album, Horses and Burning Cars, followed by her second solo album, Magnet, produced by Chris Brown. Fenner’s music was also featured on the soundtrack for the “Mystery On Fifth Avenue” Apartment project by the New York architecture firm 212box. Salamandre, co-written by her and Brown, was built around four melodies of inspiration through four centuries of music, including renaissance, classical, Victorian, a Venetian waltz, jazz, ragtime, blues, folk, and funk. Salamandre was commissioned and curated as part of the “Mystery On Fifth Avenue” by architectural designer Eric Clough. In December 2004, through January 2005, Fenner was invited to be the opening act for blues artist B.B. King on a tour through the American South, and at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut and BB King’s in New York City, performing a 30-minute set. At this time, Fenner also began to sing in several performance pieces for the visual artist Joan Jonas, among them “The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things” (originally commissioned by the Dia Beacon and subsequently performed around the world (Berlin, Sao Paolo), “Reading Dante”, and “They Come to Us Without a Word”, which premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2015.

Find Kate on Facebook. 

Check her new music video for “The Yield” by Angelica Zollo at Vimeo –

Listen to the whole release of “Middle voice” on Bandcamp  and Soundcloud 

Contact the artist or ask for press inquiries here.

Track List:

1. Two Minds
2. This Divorce
3. Beatrice
4. The Yield
5. A Marriage
6. Song & Dance
7. You’re a Big Girl Now
8. Fatal Fire
9. Hunter
10. Passenger
11. That is All