Interview: My Own Company With Kiely Connell
Photos by Alysse Gafkjen
Interview by Lindsey V. Britt
With her sophomore album, My Own Company, coming out July 19th, featuring her new song “Restless Bones”, the Nashville-based, Rust Belt-born and raised, singer-songwriter Kiely Connell is a rising artist, with a voice that compares to Wynonna Judd, and Reba McEntire. Music has always been a major part of Connell’s life, which she is now sharing with the world again after the release of her debut album Calumet Queen, in 2021.
What led you to make “My Own Company” the title track for the album?
Well because when I was writing a lot of these songs it was all throughout the ending and leaving of that relationship, it kind of follows the course of that, of thinking that you’re gonna be leaving and going on your own. And that can be a really scary thought when you’ve been loved and taken cared of for years to try to do everything on your own. Also, it’s about the sacrifice that you make as an artist, maybe you’ll never get married, maybe you’ll never have children, and those can be hard things to give up, but you do it because of what you love. And you do it because of what you think you owe yourself.
When listening to your new album I really loved the song “Hobo’s Dream.” What is the story behind that song?
That song I would describe it as I was raised catholic, but I have a very constantly evolving idea of what I think life and death is. I always think maybe I’ve lived a hundred times before, maybe I’ll live a hundred times more, like spiritually. That song is kind of just exploring that theme of maybe I’ve done this, and maybe I’ve done that. It’s just an interesting idea, past existence, and potential future existence.
What was it like making the album with Tucker Martine?
It was amazing! Tucker is the person I wanted to make a record with for probably over a decade. I’m a huge Neko Case fan, and when she put out her record called The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You, I think that was back in 2013, and that was the year I moved to Nashville. And that album kind of became the soundtrack for my life for the first couple of years that I lived here, it still is, I still listen to that album all the time. When I finally decided that I really wanted to start recording and putting out music, I started doing research on what are my favorite records, who are the people who have done them, and Tucker obviously was at the top of that list because he did that record, I love The Decemberists, he did all those records. It kind of was a running joke over the years, like you don’t really think you’re going to get to work with the people that you dream of working with, it’s kind of like a joke that you have with yourself where you’re always like, oh yeah Tucker Martine is going to do my next record, you know. Then it just was wild because when I started working with Thirty Tigers that was the first name that they said to me, and I honestly could not even believe that was an option. After I sent over the demos, he immediately responded and we had an initial two-hour-long phone conversation where we were just talking about everything that we love, even comedy, and it just seemed like that was a creative connection that was meant to be. Getting to work with him just feels like you get to become really, really close friends and family. There’s definitely I think a very long attachment there, and that’s what I hope for.
That’s so awesome. What is the kind of comedy that you both enjoy?
Haha, so at first when I realized he was out in Portland, which I mean I kind of always knew that, and I brought that up, I said hey, how do you feel, you’ve lived in Portland so long, what do you think of the show Portlandia? And we were cracking each other up over that and about Fred Armisen. He told me that Fred had been in the studio before and all that different stuff because he and Fred are both drummers, some people don’t know that Tucker is also a drummer. We just kind of were bonding over the silliness and quirkiness of Portlandia, it was great, it just made for a really entertaining phone call.
What is your songwriting process like?
Usually, I’m typically either a confessional writer, where I’m really processing my emotions through writing, or an observational writer. Because I’m one of those people you know who loves to sit in the corner of a bar alone and just kind of watch the room, or like go to a diner and have coffee and just people watch all day, and do some processing and observing. I try to just truly live life and spend a lot of time with other people. It forces you to get outside your own box, and maybe think about things that aren’t necessarily a part of your life but you’re seeing through something else. Most of the time I would say I have these ideas that I’m kind of always jotting down, or writing little notes in my phone. I used to work at a restaurant, I would stand up front and I’d have like a melody idea, or a hook idea and I would just be singing it into my phone, which I’m sure people always thought that I was crazy cause I would just run back up to the front just so I could sing something into my phone really quick, haha. I mean that’s mostly the way. I wish that I had a more concrete way of doing it, I’m kind of just always letting things come to me, and reading a lot also helps, Neil Gaiman is probably my favorite author. I read most things that he releases, and what I love about him is that he puts our reality inside of a fantasy world and it always seems so rich with metaphor, there’s just a lot of true beauty in that, like observations about the human condition. That’s I think the way that I try to be when I write as well and I think that I get that from reading a lot of my favorite authors. Reading helps a lot!
Do you have a dream collaboration?
Well, I think I’ve got one left, I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, a huge Neil Young fan, but those two don’t really collaborate, and I couldn’t really hear it. The one person that I’ve always thought it would be so amazing to sing a song with, and I do someday hope I’ll be able to is Willie Nelson. I know it’s like time is running out on that, he’s getting up there. He’s another one of my all-time favorites and he does a lot of collaboration, so that’s something I always look at and kind of think maybe I can do that, and that would be pretty magical. Other than that, I don’t know if there’s a dream team sort of idea. I got to work with Tucker which was unreal. So yeah, I would say Willie, if I could get to sing a song with Willie that would be the dream.
Do you have a favorite Willie Nelson song?
So I’ve got a couple of favorites. “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away,” I love that song! I love “Crazy” obviously, “Crazy” is one of the best. Then I love “Night Life.” I remember when I finally got to see him live. I was so glad cause he did all of my favorite songs but he did them in a medley, and I was like I want to hear the whole song but it was just little bits of it. There’s something just so incredibly raw and honest about “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away”, it just sets a scene. It’s like you can see the whole thing playing out, I love the classic feel of it, the instrumentation, there’s even a live video of him playing it that I love and I watch it over and over and over again. You can see Kris Kristofferson is in the background, and it’s some sort of legendary songwriter thing where they’re all in the same room. You can just see everybody as he’s playing that song is just In awe of the honesty.
Is there a tour in the works for the record?
I know I’m doing some dates coming up in September. I know they’re always submitting me for support opportunities as well, like I’ve been able to support really awesome stuff like Ray LaMontagne, and Ondara. I’ve had some great opportunities, I just got done touring with Tommy Prine which was great because he’s such a sweetheart too and his band is so nice, and since we’re all based out of Nashville there’s a lot of common ground there.
How did you get introduced to and started in music in the first place?
My Mom is a singer and an actress, Leslie Green, she did theater in the Chicagoland area, and she used to sing all over Chicago, she sang at Byfielld’s, she performed at Playboy Club. My mom is a great singer, her sister can sing, her dad could sing. I found out our ancestors used to make instruments as well, and when they came over here from Ireland some of them were performers back in the Vaudeville circuit, which I guess has always been a part of my destiny. When I was growing up it was always something that was a big part of my life, and my dad loves music too, so my dad was always playing classic rock but also soul stuff, like I grew up on a lot of Wilson Pickett, a lot of those classic Beatles records, The Byrds, all that kind of stuff. And then my mom being an actress, Les Misérables was basically the soundtrack to my childhood, I have the entire thing memorized which is kind of unreal for that time. She also loves Trisha Yearwood, Lisa Loeb, so my mom always had like the singer-songwriter, country kind of thing, then my dad had mostly the soul. I went to Catholic school, and I sang in the choir, and I also was in a competitive choir where we would go to all these huge choral events and compete for different awards, that was really fun, I’ve always really loved singing with other people and still to this day is one of my favorite things to do, just getting together and singing with your friends. Eventually, I also started doing musical theater and theater, I loved both, and I went to college for theater. Then I kind of was doing that professionally for a while, and then when I was doing more and more gigs through college and after college, writing my own songs finally and playing out in bars more, I just kind of realized I think music is really what I should be doing. And what’s cool is that with music you can always bring in that performance background that you got through theater.
How did you come to Nashville?
I was living in the Chicago area for a little while and then I was trying to think about the next steps. At first, I thought New York would be great but then I had a friend who was living here in Nashville, and I came to visit her. I watched a writers’ round, I just absolutely was blown away at the amount of support in the room, and how it was like everybody knew each other’s songs. They were playing on each other’s songs, they were singing with each other, and it was an incredibly moving thing. Then the more that I thought about it just became so obvious to me that this was where I needed to be. So, I moved here, then I started writing more and more, and started trying to co-write for the first time ever, which can be scary sitting in a room with all these other people and trying to get these ideas out and being worried that something you’re going to say might seem stupid at the time. I just kept doing it for years, and years, and years, and then finally I decided that I was going to put out my first record Calumet Queen. And I recorded that with my friend, all my friends played on it, which is another one of the most amazing things about this town is that you just get to work with all your friends and all the people that you love, and you all support each other. For me, music has just been my entire life since the beginning of my life, so it just feels like this is where I should be.
With you being a theater person, what is your favorite musical?
I’ve always been a big Sondheim person, which is so funny because as a child you would think that a child would hear that very complex music and probably be turned off by it, but I never was, I’ve always loved his stuff. The one that I watched that my Mom had back in the VHS days, she had recorded Broadway musicals, they used to air them on like channel 11, and one of them was Into The Woods. What’s so funny is that show is like, you would think that oh it’s all of these fairytale characters, why would that be inappropriate for children? But it’s incredibly dark, all of this really heavy stuff, and also the Big Bad Wolf costume is physically correct… like there’s a penis on the costume, and as a child you’re like I didn’t even realize that, haha. But I’m obsessed with that show and there’s a song that Jack from Jack And The Beanstalk sings “Giants in the Sky” and I loved that song and “Children Will Listen” like that music is so ingrained in me, it’s some of my favorite music of all time. So like that one, Les Misérables. For plays, man, there are so many beautiful plays. I got to do The Laramie Project, which is probably my favorite play that I’ve ever done, it was just an incredibly rewarding experience. For those who aren’t familiar with that play, Matthew Shepard was murdered back in Wyoming as a young gay man and it was this huge controversial thing. The Laramie Project is all about how that incident and his death shocked their entire community, and for a long time it would feel like it defined the community, what’s cool is the entire show is all real monologues of interviews from people in the town, and that would probably be my favorite play that I’ve done. Other plays, there’s so many good ones. I think Dancing at Lughnasa is a beautiful play, they turned that into a movie Meryl Streep is in. There are just so many good ones, and that’s the cool thing about theater and performance in general, it just really has the power to move people and transport them to special places.
I know you’re a huge fan of Izaak Opatz, what about him inspires you?
I love him! It’s kind of funny about him, and I’ve told him this, I don’t think he will remember me, I’ve been to a ton of his shows over the years, but what I love about him is that vocally he kind of has a vocal tone like Willie Nelson. Then his writing is just really beautiful, and quirky, and a very unique point of view, cause he’s this Montana man who just works in state parks but just writes the incredibly beautiful music. And he always writes really clever guitar hooks, I have just always thought he’s a really interesting current artist to me, and I don’t really feel that way about many people
What’s something about you most people don’t know about?
Well, I don’t even know if it’s something most people don’t know about, I feel like I’m usually pretty transparent because I think that why I’m always so open about talking about mental health stuff too is because I just think that’s it’s important. When you allow people to know these things about you and to peer into your life, it can help people who maybe feel like they are very alone, feeling like nobody relates to them and then they’ll go, oh you know I felt this too, hey I do that, you know. I think it kind of has the power to bring us together. So, I’m pretty sure everybody knows these things about me but I’m really big into flea markets and antiquing, anything like that. I like those really obscure Victorian antiques that are kind of hard to find. Like Victorians had such a really strange culture and life, it was like the weirdest time I feel like to be alive, and I’m really fascinated by that. The fact that they used to pose their dead relatives and take pictures of people who were dead like they were just sitting in a chair, they also used to make these little sculptures out of hair, they’re so odd. That’s what I love about going to these antique stores is you just look at these things and you’re like what is this, and then it causes you to do this deep drive. Folk art is like that a lot, you look at weird things, like a painting on a piece of wood, or like some weird cabinet thing that you’re like what did they use this for? What is on here? That’s just kind of fascinating, I’ll pick a random town that’s a couple of towns away and just drive out and poke around and look at random things. I love hiking, there was a time where I was in the initial phases of researching hiking the Appalachian trail, and a friend of mine were really, really talking about it, taking all the time off work. I was watching all these videos about all of the equipment that you would need, what one person sleeper tents are the most efficient, shoes, thinking about getting a hammock to sleep in which I’ve never seen myself sleeping in so I don’t know. It kind of got to the point that after we had been researching it, I just realized like how much I have to do, how much money it actually takes, it’s like pretty expensive because you have to be gone for so long, and ultimately we decided let’s not do that, maybe we’ll just choose some state parks and do some section hiking instead, which I think is probably the smarter choice, haha!
Since you live in Nashville, I’m sure you’ve been to lots of gigs, what’s been your favorite gig you’ve performed or attended?
I’ve got a handful of them that I just absolutely loved for different reasons. Obviously, growing up in North-West Indiana being so close to Chicago. My mind was blown when I got to play Chicago Theater with Ray LaMontagne, that was just like unreal. And what’s crazy is the last time I was at a show at the Chicago Theater it was Iggy Pop and I love Iggy Pop, and I was like you’ve got to be kidding me that I get to be on the same stage where I just saw Iggy Pop. That was really cool. The other one I actually did last summer with Ondara, we did Levon Helm Studios, it’s out like in Woodstock, NY. It’s really cool, basically it’s this incredible community there who knew Levon when he was alive, and they still do all of these incredible performances where it’s all the classic stuff that The Band used to do, and it’s like they all live around there. There’s this woman who she’s like the green room coordinator. She takes care of everybody who’s in there and she has the best stories about like Springsteen from back in New Jersey, and they had kegs of local beer there for you, the whole thing was like catered, and it just felt like family. You feel like you’re there listening to your aunt tell you some cool stories. And the fact that Levon Helm, that’s his spot, it just feels magical, like a huge part of him is definitely still there even after his passing.
Lastly, do you have a recommendation? This can be anything you want, movies, books, advice, anything.
For movies, I would say if you haven’t seen Midnight in Paris, you have to see Midnight in Paris. That’s one of the best movies ever, and I feel like if you are a true romantic at heart you can really relate to Owen Wilson’s character in that movie. Then I would say for literature, if you haven’t read Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, you have to read it. Restaurants, if you want a great true Nashville diner/meat and three experience, you have to go to Wendell Smith’s. Those are the three.
Be sure to check out My Own Company on July 19th, along with Connell’s upcoming performances this summer.
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