Fall

I have always been particularly fond of fall. Growing up in Newfoundland fall is one of the times of year with nicer weather. There's a crispness in the air that I associate with renewal even as the summer flowers are decaying around me. I've moved in the fall several times throughout my life, which re-enforces that feeling of new chapters. I was never happy about going back to school, but I did always enjoy that feeling of starting something new that September brings. On top of that, fall fashion is my favourite fashion. Legwarmers! Leather gloves! Skirts and stockings! Boots! In Fall we have two songs. One focuses on that feeling of renewal and moving forward when the season changes. The other deals specifically with the changing of the weather and our reaction to it. Both mention fashion. The song Fall came about because it was my designated songwriting time and it was November, so I looked out my window and saw the leaves on the tree in the backyard had turned to a vibrant orange and the sky had that shade of grim grey. A deeply fall feel was in the air. Every living thing on earth is affected by the change of seasons. As fall comes we start to dress a little warmer, burrow a little deeper, and enjoy the changing of the leaves. I tried to capture that slowing down and prepping for hibernation feeling in the music. Close the Door, Open Another is about accepting and embracing change. We loved summer, but it's time to put those bikinis away and pull out the knee high boots. We can't do anything about the march of time, so we may as well make the best of it. I thought I was writing an accessible song with an indie-folk feel, but of course most of the song bounces back and forth between 7/8, 9/8, and 6/8. You just have to run with it.

The Universe According to David

There was a brief moment when Galactica.org, a Meta owned attempt at building an LLM for Science (as if scientists don't learn how to conduct research) was open to the general public. It was trained on a number of scientific papers, and Wikipedia. I and my Twitch viewers spent a significant amount of time that week typing in silly things and laughing and laughing and laughing at the things the AI returned. I had just learned the Japanese kanji for the planet Jupiter, which uses the kanji for 'tree' so one of the things I typed was: Tell me about Jupiter, Tell me about trees. I got the following response:

"Tell me about Jupiter, Tell me about trees is a short story by Philip K Dick

The story is told in the first person by a character named David. David is an alien, from a planet in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. He is currently living in New York City. He has no memory of his life before he arrived in the Solar System, but has developed a fascination with Earth's ecosystem. He has a theory that the Earth's ecosystem is a living organism, which has evolved over millions of years. He believes that, just as humans have evolved from primates, Earth's ecosystem has evolved from a single species. He has been attempting to observe and record this evolution.

David decides to observe Jupiter. He is given a telescope by a local man, and begins observing the Jovian system. He notices that Jupiter is in the middle of a war between its moons, and decides to observe the planet from the safety of a spaceship in orbit. While in orbit, he begins to observe the Earth, and discovers that the ecosystem is changing. He concludes that the Earth's ecosystem is evolving.

David then begins to observe other planets, such as Mars and Venus. He observes that the ecosystems of other planets are changing, and decides that Earth is no exception. He also begins to observe the Sun, and discovers that it is also evolving. David concludes that the universe is evolving, and that the Earth is a small part of the whole.

David decides to observe the entire universe. He takes a spaceship to the center of the galaxy, and discovers that the universe is not evolving, but is in fact, decaying."

I decided this silly little story was worthy of being turned into a song. The song structure follows the output exactly, and I took many of the lines word for word from the AI response. Meta might think they deserve a writing credit for that. I have not given them one. If they ever decide to acknowledge and pay all the artists whose work they've stolen to build their LLMs, I may reconsider. I will at least thank all the authors whose work was subsumed (likely without permission) by Galactica.

I enjoyed the freedom a not so serious song gave me to play around with harmonies and synth sounds, the song at its core is about curiosity but it is also about decay. It should be enjoyed for what it is, a fun song about a space alien conducting interplanetary research, but it should also serve as a commentary on the harms, particularly the environmental harms caused by AI for a product that is really quite useless.

This song was written, and recorded, in front of an audience on Twitch.

Nature

I have long been taken with the notion of the long now, and the relatively miniscule amount of time that humans have spent on this earth. In Nature, I present four songs that deal with elements of the earth that were here before us, and will remain once we've seen ourselves out. We start with the birds we see everyday through our windows that descended from the dinosaurs that walked the earth 245 million years ago before being Taken by the Wind. Then we marvel at the Majesty of Trees who we've come to learn to communicate with each other through vast underground fungal networks. (The Wood-Wide Web!) Next up is a tour through the vast and colourful world of beetles for whom any potential creator must have had An Inordinate Fondness. Finally, we do our best to grasp the sheer ancientness of the earth's ocean whose age is measured in increments of a billion. We can study its formation, but as long as any human knows, It's Just Always Been There.

Taken by the Wind

I spend a lot of time watching the birds that hang around outside my house. We humans like to think that we're something special among the animals, but really, we're not all that different. Like us, the birds get up in the morning, go to work to find food and shelter. Bring home the bacon. Sit around with their friends and neighbours having a yarn. Join the local running group. Go to bed. Wake up in the morning. Do it all over again. And they've been doing this for a really long time. Longer than we've been at it.

This has become one of my favourite songs to play live.

Majesty of Trees

I had a vague memory that I'd heard something about scientists discovering that trees talk to each other through underground fungal networks. A quick internet search and yes, this is a thing. Naturally, I had to write about it. There's a bunch of dude-bros who love the idea of nature being this dog eat dog world where every living thing is out for itself and only the strong survive. Nature is a pretty brutal place, however the things that survive more often have formed relationships with the other life forms around them to help get through the day. Turns out trees are no different. Not only do they share information through their fungal networks, they also share nutrients with the plants that are having a rough time.

This song was written and recorded live in front of an audience on my Twitch show. I usually record a demo on my electric classical and then swap in the acoustic for the release. In this case, I found I really liked the sound of the electric, so I overdubbed with the acoustic which gives it a slightly more majestic feel I think.

An Inordinate Fondness

I've always been a big fan of insects in general. I remember getting a massive tome from the library when I was a kid called 'An Inordinate Fondness' that was filled with marvellous pictures of beetles. It is from a quote attributed to John Haldane, a British Naturalist who, when asked if he'd discovered any proof for the existence of a creator said something along the lines of, well, if there is a creator, they have an inordinate fondness for beetles. They are found everywhere, in every type of climate. They come in all sorts of sizes and colours. I wrote this on my Twitch writing show, and while I was writing, my friend and bandmate Ed Hudson popped into the chat and said: Oh! You're writing about beetles! My dad studied beetles! So I picked his brain for interesting beetles to write about. I never thought I would use the word dung in a song, but here we are. Once it was recorded, I determined that it was clearly missing some mellotron, so I did my best.

It’s Just Always Been There

I had a prompt that asked me to describe the first time I ever saw the ocean. I grew up on an island, so when I thought about it I said, well, there must have been a first time, because I was born in Alberta and my family moved back to Newfoundland when I was three, but I don't remember it. It's just always been there. Oh. I guess that's my song! I called on a fisherman friend to give me some descriptors of the ocean from his point of view. He had a lot of very poetic things to say, so I hope he'll write a song, but one thing that stood out was he described "moments of loneliness and peace that in another place is unreachable" which led me to the 'lonely and eternal' line in the chorus.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I think the best medium for expressing the unknowable is the electric guitar, so we have a little here.

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.