Osborne ready to reignite her career flame
Singer breaks free from labels with new album Set the Fire
In 1984, an exciting new band named 54-40 released its debut album, titled Set the Fire. In 2021, Kandle Osborne chose that title for her new album. It's a play on words for the daughter of 54-40 frontman Neil Osborne.
Her well-received 2014 debut, In Flames, produced a JUNO-nominated and Prism Prize-winning video for Not Up to Me. Then, owing to the machinations of the music business, things fizzled.
Now she's ready to reignite the career flame.
“I have always been in the hands of managers and labels that never had my best interest at heart, and I've repeated that three times,” said Osborne. “After the great reception for In Flames, I found myself in a situation where I was promised the world and told I was the next big thing only to be denied any interviews or releasing any music for the next four years. It eventually wound-up involving lawyers and what's happening now is I have my freedom. You are seeing and hearing the results of that.”
She has been busy making up for lost time since she regained full control of her career. At a time when COVID-19 is dragging many down, the singer says she has entered a period of intense productivity.
In 2020, Kandle and Neil teamed-up for a session of sun-drenched blues punk as the duo, the Family Curse. The EP Stick Around and Find Out dropped in July that year. In January, Birds, an acoustic album of Neil Young covers featuring her and fiddler/ singer Kendel Carson, was released. A steady stream of singles, including a Christmas song, with accompanying videos, also has been rolled out in advance of Set the Fire's release May 28.
In keeping with her tendency to make captivating videos to go with her music, the clip for Lock and Load is nominated for a 2021 Prism Prize. The Brandon William Fletcher-directed video features busy Hollywood North actor Keenan Tracey (Bates Motel, The 100) in a retro torch ballad. The tune would fit right into any classic Bond film montage. The story behind the song straddles continents.
“I was living in England and was working on some music with Youth from Killing Joke, who had just invited me over to his space to play around with some music for fun,” she said. “As it happened, I hit it off with his engineer, Michael Rendall, at that session and we started trading voice notes one night which wound up being the song Lock and Load. That experience made it obvious that we were destined to make music together, because he is both an amazing songwriter as well as an engineer and producer.”
Now working as an entirely independent musician, she set about exploring the options available to her to record. Combining a FACTOR and an Amplify B.C. grant, she was able to get funding together to fly Rendall over to B.C. to make a record. Naturally, this was March 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic.
“Within one week, we were in lockdown, so we quaran- tined in the studio and kept going,” she said. “It was a pretty weird time, shut up in HippoSonic Studio making the best record we could and losing ourselves in the music to stay focused. We were lucky to get pre-lockdown help from 54-40 guitarist Dave Genn, a drummer, and getting in the three wonderful ladies to sing Supremes-style epic harmony parts done before I'd even recorded my vocals.”
The “holy trinity” of vocal- ists heard all over Set the Fire include musicians Debra- Jean Creelman, Louise Burns and Kendall Carson. Dubbed “The Wiccs” for their haunting harmonies, the trio turned the entire session on its head. Their contributions proved to be the conceptual guide for subsequent singles from the new album, such as Honey Trap. This slinky ballad features The Wiccs as both backing vocalists and, with the addition of Tess Ananda, backing band.
“So often you do harmonies and backing vocals last, filling up all the space you can before adding them,” she said. “But here we were with bass, drums and incredible backing vocals which didn't need much more than a bit of piano there, some guitar here, and no big push to fill the space. It was good that worked out that way, because that day they came in and did, literally, a whole album in a day, and was the last time we could all be together in the studio.”