Spring!

This is my first single with a b-side that I've released and I'm quite pleased with it. I had initially just planned to release the song Spring! but once I had it recorded, I thought that the very short and sweet Seeds would make a great accompaniment. Spring! initially came out of my involvement with Tree Songs, a series of online concerts that were set up to raise awareness around a forest in our nation's capital slated to be cut down to, get this, put up a parking lot.

I wanted Spring! to be pretty stripped down. I had initially planned to just do guitar and vocals, as I would do it live, with a little added bass. After I had that initial recording, I thought, well, maybe just a couple extra 'Spring!' vocals in the chorus. And then it was, oh, maybe just a bit more on the last chorus. Oh, maybe just a touch here in the verses. So we've ended up with a bunch of very Steeleye Span influenced backing vocals throughout the song that I'm quite pleased with.

Seeds is a very short song that I wrote during one of the Song Fancy 5 in 5 Challenges. (Write a song to a prompt every day from Monday to Friday for one week.) This song was written on a Thursday. Many of my shortest songs were written on the Thursday of the 5 in 5 lol. The prompt was a list of 10 words, with the idea that you use 5 in a song. Two of those words were 'dirt' 'wind' which got me thinking about how seeds are distributed. (As of writing, this song is still listed in my Twitch streamer request list as 'Untitled song about plant sex.' It didn't get called Seeds until I uploaded it to my distributor. ) With time, I changed dirt and wind to earth and breeze.

Since this is such a short and silly little song I thought I'd let myself have fun with the recording. I did a straight run through of the song and then a repeat with a ton of layered vocals and glockenspiel. It really reminds me of something Blind Melon might have done. This seems like something that I could someday release a 12 minute cut of. This cut is 1 minute and 13 seconds.

Rush for Cover

It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that I am a pretty big fan of the band Rush. (I once had an audience member yell 'Say Kyla, do you like Rush?' in the middle of a set cuz...uh...I sound like I like Rush.) A few years ago, a twitter friend told me about a label looking for artists for a Rush tribute album. I got in touch with the label with a couple suggestions of songs I might like to do, (including Subdivisions) and an mp3 of Swimsuit & Axe as an example of what of sound we'd likely end up with. They were receptive to the idea and asked if I would do Subdivisions. The album is just out this year, but the recording happened during the time that I was recording my Bloom & Grow album, and it had a bit of an influence on what I would do there.

For Subdivisions I decided against drums, as what are you going to replace Neil Peart's drums with, and went whole hog into the guitar arrangement. It's mainly classical guitar, with an electric solo towards the end, some light bass, and a few backing vocals. I spent quite a bit of time working out my arrangement, and when I finally had a first draft of a recording done, I was surprised by how much it sounded like one of my own songs. They really were a big influence on me, and my gosh do I love 7/8.

The most out there part of the recording for me was doing the whispers for the word 'Subdivisions' in the chorus. It felt off to speak the word aloud like in the original, and I wasn't sure how I was going to approach it, but I settled on a sort of more whispered version. An emphatic whisper? Hearing those parts back inspired me to add whispered backing vocals to the 7/8 verses of the song Bloom & Grow, which I'm sure I wouldn't have thought to do otherwise. I also ended up using a very similar electric guitar tone on that album. It's a super 80s tone, but I really liked the way it worked over the classical guitar in Subdivisions, and I found it fitting for the stately solo in After the Battle. Again, I don't think I would have made the decision to use that particular tone without having done this Subdivisions cover. (Now...I kind of try using it for everything...)

I play my husband's left-handed tuned to D standard Steinberger bass on this. I am not left-handed, and I always play in E standard tuning. My bass was out of commision for some time, so I did a number of recordings, flipped and tuned down. I also sort of felt it fitting to play a Steinberger on a Rush song.

Skate Punk

A fun upbeat commentary on toxic masculinity as seen through the eyes of a fish.

I was working with a songwriting prompt that was simply a list of words. I knew enough to recognize that all the words had to do with skateboarding, but not enough to feel confident writing a song about it. I do however, live on an island, and we have skate, the fish, off our shores. Skates have spikes along their spines like a punk has spikes on their clothes, and they are tough, but very graceful creatures.

While reading about their mating practices I very quickly found myself writing from the point of view of a lady skate who is sick and tired of all the posturing and bullying that goes on every year in the skate mating grounds. She finds herself wishing for a mate who makes the most of their underwater environment, riding the rip tide and doing mad tricks on the ocean waves.

The recording is simple and straightforward. Nylon string guitar, light bass, just a touch of backing vocals, and some electric guitar to mimic the undulations of the skate.

Road Trip

This EP grew out of 'Untitled Song About Driving' which I wrote after finding myself mesmerized by a program on TV that was simply showing dash cam footage of someone driving through the Canadian province of Quebec. It made me think of all the long drives I have taken on Canadian highways, and the hypnosis that occurs after several hundred kilometres of trees and rocks broken by the occasional white cross on the side of the road, or declaration of love spray painted on an overpass.

To capture those meditative qualities the song structure is very repetitive, which is quite a departure for me and my progressive rock background. I wrote the song live in front of my audience on Twitch, and it soon became a crowd favourite. Since it was such an anomaly for me, I decided that in order to release it, I would write two songs to bookend it on an EP. First came 'Red Twist' which is about that feeling of spotting the twisted red neon 'Vacancy' sign on a roadside motel, and pulling over to crash after a long day of driving. Then I went back to write 'Packing the Car'. There's a very specific early morning feeling, before the rest of the world wakes up, that I wanted to capture here. The fuzziness in your brain before you've had your coffee, the haze and mist in the sky before the sun fully rises. Also, no matter how well prepared you are, there's always that little voice of doubt wondering if you did all the things you were supposed to do, and packed all the things you were supposed to bring. And maybe the weather won't cooperate.

No final destination is reached in this EP. The point of the road trip is that you got in the car and went. Where you end up is up to the listener. All three songs were written and recorded live on Twitch.

A Taste of Things to Come

In 2023 I participated in the RPM Challenge by recording songs for 3 EPs that I planned to release later on in the year. I put one song from each EP on this little teaser to submit to the challenge. I had some other ideas in between then and now and the other two EPs will be released over the course of the coming year.

Bloom & Grow

A collection of songs about personal growth, self-acceptance, and the obstacles that get in the way of an individual's quest for immortality.

Each of the songs on Bloom & Grow focuses in some way on the very human drive to do better, accomplish great things, and leave something of ourselves behind. As this is no easy endeavour, themes of depression, regret, uncertainty, and self-doubt are found throughout.

It is a very mercurial album which tells the stories of a number of solitary individuals, mostly outsiders, from times present, past, and future. They deal with issues as mundane as housework, as personal as mental health, as sublime as appreciating art, and as final as facing death. There is an emphasis on the importance of mastering one's craft as well as the importance of accepting oneself.

This is possibly the most personal of my albums to date. I'm particularly proud of this one.

Vagarys

A short collection of humorous numbers about dinner parties, swimming, dating, getting grumpier and patronizing the arts. Most of the songs involve situations in which things don't go exactly as planned.

All five songs were written between December 2019 and July 2020 using songwriting prompts, then recorded in my temporary lodgings in the in between time and space of leaving Montreal and finding my current abode in Newfoundland. I consider this the follow up to Whimseys. Those two EPs would go in a boxed set.

New Shoes

This is my first full-length album, released in the summer of 2019, It's a collection of songs written over the course of a decade (and a half...), telling the stories of women from different walks of life, interspersed with numbers about relatable day-to-day situations. The set list was mostly chosen from songs that were frequently in my set list at that time, as well as a couple deeper cuts.

About half the album is simply guitar and voice (maybe with a touch of bass) to give the listener the closest idea of attending a Kyla Tilley live show. The other half I had friends over to sing back-up, a fiddler friend came, my drummer husband added some things. I play a handful of other instruments on this one as well. This album also includes my original version of the song Little, which was recorded by Canadian Idol finalist Jenny Gear.

I toured Eastern Canada with this album when it was released and was preparing for a tour of Southern Ontario to promote it further when the pandemic shut everything down. I didn't know about the internet back then (I was about to discover it!) So instead of pushing it online for the next year, my old-school brain said: Well, you can't tour with it, it's done. Get started on the next thing. So I wrote it off and got started on the next project. Ouf.

Loose Summer

Composed as cat-walk music for a Swervy Garland summer fashion show. Largely instrumental flute and guitar with bottle, bell, concrete floor and shisha pipe percussion. This was written and recorded over the course of a week while I was staying at my Mother-in-law's house. There is only one section with vocals on this album and I'm not the one singing! I was told that Kaitlin Ludlow, one of the models, was a good singer, so I had her come in and quickly learn the song and lay down the vocals. I think she did a great job.

I wasn't sure what to do with this music when the show was done, but then I decided that it would be a good way to prepare everybody for my Queen Prog side. What better way to do that then to release a 15 minute long mostly instrumental track filled with found sounds? In retrospect, I should have released it as 5 short tracks. I would have been able to pitch them to chill instrumental playlists. But you know, I didn't know about the internet back then. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Whimseys

Kyla's first EP. Recorded in 5 days, simple guitar and vocals, tracked simultaneously, one song per day. I went into my jam space each morning (when the fewest other musicians would be practising nearby) and did two hours of takes in between the moments when the air circulation unit turned on and off, and while distant drummers took breaks from drumming. By noon the building would be full of other music, so I'd spend two hours practising the song I planned to record the next morning. I'm very happy with how it turned out.