BRAIN INJURY DIDN’T STOP SINGER FROM LIVING LIFE
Calgary native releases new album after recovering from car crash
A few years back, Kinnie Starr recorded an album that was meant to be the followup to 2014’s From Far Away.
It never saw the light of day. Aporia, the Toronto-based record label that released her past three records, refused to put it out, strongly suggesting that it was not up to her standards.
“I remember being both angry and relieved,” Starr says in an interview from her home in British Columbia. “I could tell that it wasn’t that good but I couldn’t really tell how to fix it. I had never submitted anything where the label wasn’t like, ‘Oh yeah, let’s go!’ For a minute, my ego got involved. I was like, ‘Oh (expletive), I must suck.’ ”
In retrospect, the Calgary native sees the company’s refusal to put out the record as a blessing. It wasn’t just a case of creative fatigue or writer’s block. Starr didn’t know how to “fix” the record because she was still suffering from a traumatic brain injury, the result of a 2015 car crash. It had been a rainy April afternoon in Vancouver when the taxicab she was in was hit by a car that had rolled through a stop sign. Everything changed. As she described in a 2017 essay for the CBC, she would get debilitating headaches. She was slurring her words. She walked differently, becoming “clumsier and clumsier.” She felt like her senses were “on overdrive.” Being exposed to certain sounds or loud noises made her feel nauseous. She would cry compulsively and be overwhelmed by feelings of dread. She had trouble making decisions and performing simple tasks and spent most of her time sleeping. Her left arm didn’t function properly. She couldn’t write music or play instruments.
Still, Aporia didn’t give up on her. They told her to go back to the drawing board and brought in producer and songwriter Douglas Romanow to assist. It was still a painful, frustrating process. But Starr says Romanow showed saintly levels of patience as they worked toward what would become her eighth studio record, Feed the Fire.
“I could only work for half an hour at a time and then I was like, ‘I need to go to bed, I need to lie down and it will be three hours before I can do anything,’ ” Starr says. “He was so patient with the pulses that I had, and the energy. I think anyone that has ever been injured can relate. It would be like, ‘I can’t do this right now. Right now, I need to stop.’ ”
Which makes Feed the Fire even more of a miracle. In many ways, the 10-song album seems like hallmark Kinnie Starr. It can be fierce, uncompromising, angry, despairing, funny and uplifting while showcasing a number of styles that the genre-hopping artist has mastered since beginning her recording career more than 20 years ago.
Her long recovery certainly plays into the provocative lyrics, although in unexpected ways. The songs don’t directly chronicle her experiences after the crash. But they do reflect a deepening interest in communication, isolation, faith and anxiety in the digital age, all things she had tackled in her lyrics before but found herself thinking more deeply about in the past few years. With Romanow making many of the production and sonic decisions, Starr used all her energy to deep-dive into her pet themes.
“I feel like the experience with Doug freed me,” she says. “So my lyrics are very focused on my concerns and my concerns are how we communicate and how much love we share with each other and family and resolution and nature. They have always been there for me. In this situation, because I was freed up from producing, I was really able to explore those concepts in a more focused manner. I feel like I got to the root of some stuff.”
So it’s hardly surprising that the album can go to some dark places, even when wrapped in infectious beats and sparkling pop melodies. The thumping single Gotta Do Something is told from the point of view of a man “addicted to porn and trolling the Internet for a fight.” The trippy hip-hop tune Vendetta is about the death of civility on social media. The melodic final track We Are Sky, perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful song on the album, is about a stalker who had terrorized Starr for two years.
“That’s all about trying to have compassion for this person who was trying to hurt me,” she says. “It was a very intense exercise, and I couldn’t have done it without Doug because he created that space for me to think. These lyrics would just pour out of me and I would be like: ‘I’m done. I can’t be around sound for like two days.’ ”
It’s not that Starr was ever unfocused when it came to her career. But she has always showcased a certain artistic restlessness that went beyond dabbling in various musical styles. In fact, while she was enamoured with underground hip-hop and punk while growing up in Calgary and attending Western Canada High School, she didn’t try her hand at music until after getting a degree in Women’s Studies from Queen’s University and establishing herself as a visual artist.
But her arrival in the business in her mid-20s was impressive. Early on, she became the focus of a bidding war between major labels before signing with Island/Def Jam in the late 1990s for a short stint. In between albums, she has done everything from publishing a book of poetry to performing for Cirque du soleil in Las Vegas to helping oversee the recently released Play Your Gender, a documentary that found her interviewing artists such as fellow Calgarian Sara Quinn and Hole’s Melissa Auf de Maur in a quest to find out why only five per cent of music producers are women when the industry produces so many female pop stars.
For now, while she says she has been feeling better over the past six months, Starr has no plans of returning to regular live performances anytime soon. She continues to undergo physical rehabilitation, something she expects to last at least a few more years. Still, she will continue promoting the documentary and has a lecture and performance planned for York University later this month entitled Our Divide is Inside Us.
“I’m very grateful to be working,” Starr says. “We should all be super grateful for everything that we have. Because it can be over in like five seconds. That’s all it takes.”