After six days Jesus took with him Peter, James and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There, he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.
—Matthew 17:2
As the title suggests, Transfiguration Highway, the forthcoming album from Toronto indie rock outfit Little Kid, is a record of change. To be released via New York’s Solitaire Recordings, the album is shaped from the enduring interest of lead Kenny Boothby in Christian mysticism, re-purposing Biblical tales and imagery to explore his own personal and spiritual evolution. The style is nuanced and intelligent, too self-aware to fall into any reductive view of what religion can offer. As we explained in a preview piece on single ‘Thief on the Cross‘:
While Little Kid are certainly not a Christian band in the traditional sense, they do not shy away from spiritual themes. Their use of religious imagery is therefore multiplicitous, ironic and playful in ways that subvert the dusty conventions of Christianity but engaging with questions of spirituality in a manner that is fundamentally sincere too.
Little Kid has been going for a decade, the band building a dedicated following across five full-length albums, and the new record feels like the accumulation of all that experience. The intimacy of the early releases is still present, the themes too, but what was once promise is now a realised style. Boothby is fully confident in his ability and vision, and the result is the most ambitious Little Kid release to date. But this is not manifested as some newfound maximalism but rather a clarity—the ability to judge the balance between what is given and what is withheld, between the big and the small, the personal, the communal, the metaphysical.
Transfiguration Highway isn’t out until the beginning of July, but today the band unveil a brand new single, ‘Losing’, to whet the appetite further. We took the opportunity to ask the band a few questions, digging a little deeper into record to give some background on its creation and some indications of what is to come, so listen to ‘Losing’ below and scroll on down to find out more.
Thanks for taking the time to speak to us! How would you describe the album? Has it been long in the making?
Thank you for having me! I would describe the album as indie rock shaped by folk and country, with some experimental recording techniques thrown in. It was actually a pretty quick process for us – similar to the two before it. We started with the bed tracks recorded live to tape in the fall and winter of 2018 and then had the overdubs finished by around April 2019. I think we have come to trust our instincts and work quickly – songs were sort of written / fleshed out as we recorded them, which has been our preferred process for the recent albums. However, it has been a longer process to release it than we’ve been used to. We are working with a label for the first time and it’s been a more intentional lead-up to the release, but I think it will definitely be worth the extra time and effort.
I wanted to ask about the spiritual themes on the record. So much of the music that explores religious themes falls into a reductive binary: overt, capital-C, capital-M Christian Music or that angry, slightly adolescent railing-against-mom-and-dad sort of thing. But it’s far more nuanced and interesting in your work. Could you go a little deeper into your relationship with this stuff?
Thank you. I love a lot of Christian music, or other spiritual music, but I agree that you have to fit into a pretty small box to meet most folks’ criteria for “Christian Music” per se… Not a lot of room for nuance, at least in more recent Christian music, which I guess is understandable in the context of conventional worship – people don’t want to leave church feeling low and full of doubts, even if that is a very real part of the Christian experience. But there’s plenty of precedent for art that explores religion and spirituality and leaves room for the less “Sunday Morning” aspects of that experience… The Bible itself is full of it. As for my personal relationship to it, I’ve been trying not to answer that too directly when folks ask because I feel like the words in the songs answer that in a deeper way than I might be able to without the music… But it’s safe to say I wouldn’t meet almost anyone’s criteria for being a Christian, just like the music wouldn’t meet those requirements.
Growing up, I listened to Christian music almost exclusively, but as a teenager I started branching out into other bands I’d heard because they toured with bands I knew to be Christian, and I found myself connecting most with the ones I wasn’t quite sure about… Off the top of my head, I’m remembering poring over the CD booklets for albums like Lovedrug’s Pretend You’re Alive, The Appleseed Cast’s Peregrine, Copeland’s In Motion, looking for evidence one way or the other on the “are they or aren’t they Christian?” question, but never really reaching a firm conclusion… But I ended up finding those records were the ones that I ended up developing a special relationship with back then. So I’m happy if Little Kid ends up occupying a similar place for folks coming from that world, although I’d also hope folks without that experience can still finding something in there and aren’t too alienated by that stuff.
There’s a motif of movement across these songs, the motion of growing up and going through life that’s typified by the metaphorical highway of the title. But what interests me most is the transfiguration, because that suggests some end to the journey, some bright destination. I think I’m so used to the ‘in the end, the journey was the destination all along’ reveal in art that this really stands out. The possibility of transcending the present, of achieving some higher state. What does transfiguration mean to you?
The meaning of the title, and transfiguration in general, has kinda been shifting for me the further I get away from the album, I think. One idea I keep coming back to is comparing it to the name of the Trans-Canada Highway, this system of highways that travels across Canada… I like to think of the Trans-Figuration Highway as one that travels across figurations – rather than thinking of one single transfiguration waiting at the end of the highway, picturing these different formations as stops along the way… if that makes any sense. Hard to tell when talking about this stuff sometimes.
On the subject of change, I believe this is the sixth Little Kid album, which feels like some sort of milestone. Are you conscious of how the project has (or hasn’t) changed across those years? Does it get easier or more difficult to make records as you get more under your belt?
Each one feels like a bit of a milestone! I didn’t anticipate creating so many albums for this project, but now that we’re here, I’m thinking we’re only halfway done or less. I am certainly conscious that the music has shifted over time – in most ways, this album is pretty far off from what I was doing on the first Little Kid album… I think there is usually less experimentation with sonic textures (we didn’t even use any guitar pedals on this one), and the songs are less noisy and demanding in certain ways, but the songwriting has become more experimental overall. I think we’ve pushed in two directions at once: in some ways the songs are more “pop” songs than ever (shorter, more “choruses”), but the chord progressions have moved in some very wacky directions and there are more surprises with the song structures, I think.
As for getting easier or harder… I think overall it’s been getting easier. After Flowers took like three years to finish, we decided we had no excuse to not make our next albums a lot faster. Paul had set up an extremely functional home studio around then, so there were fewer logistical complications with recording, and we eventually settled into a workflow that played on all of our strengths. The songwriting still starts from some kind of spark while I’m playing music alone, but playing the songs with the other members helps them become more realized songs, and knowing I have a rehearsal or recording day scheduled with them can act as a deadline that helps me get my ideas in order. All the band members bring a lot to the recording process, but Paul in particular has a gift for hammering out a vision for the recorded version. He’s a great complement to me in the sense that he is very practical and has great intuition – he knows when to reign in my more ridiculous ideas and when to indulge them.
Are there any other things that influence your work? Books, films, things like that?
I have sadly fallen out of the habit of reading these days… Earlier on, I would definitely have counted Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, and E. Annie Proulx as influences on the lyrics, and they probably still have some influence even though it’s been a while since I really delved into a book. I’ve been slowly reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids more recently but only in small bursts.
I do watch a lot of movies, though. It’d be hard to pinpoint how they might have influenced my songwriting, but maybe there’s something to it… My favourite movies often end up being the ones with some connection to my history, especially ones that play with religion and/or repressed sexuality… I rewatched The Last Picture Show somewhat recently, and I was thinking it shared some thematic elements with Transfiguration Highway, and a lot of my writing in general.
But mostly I think I’m influenced by the albums that draw me in the most… I love the album as an artform, and usually only listen to music in that format. The records that were most formative to my songwriting approach on this album would probably be Bob Dylan’s gold streak from Bringing it All Back Home through Blonde on Blonde, Big Thief’s Capacity, Gillian Welch’s Time (The Revelator) Gram Parson and Emmylou Harris’s Grievous Angel, and Chris Cohen’s Overgrown Path.
Transfiguration Highway is out via Solitaire Recordings and you can pre-order it now on a variety of formats.
Album design by James Lee Chiahan