Kate Weekes is heading west into the mountains on the video for her new single Poet Friend — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
The spry folk-jazz charmer about a weary woman in need of healing words serves as a preview of the intrepid singer-songwriter’s upcoming third album Taken By Surprise, a disc that chronicles both the physical landscape around Weekes and the emotional one within.
“The thing that caught me off-guard with this album was how much it deals with raw emotion and what I was feeling. That wasn’t at all my objective,” she laughs. “But that’s how it turned out. So while the songs are coloured by external experiences, they come from a place of what I was feeling when those things happened.”
Now based in Ontario after nearly a decade in the Yukon’s vibrant music scene, Weekes drew on an astonishing array of experiences including (but not limited to) dog mushing-for-hire in Norway, touring China with a swing band, canoeing from Whitehorse to Dawson City and, notably, several intense personal relationships to write the mournful and joyous Taken by Surprise.
That unique backstory explains why a one-genre description simply cannot capture the album’s musical scope. It’s eclectic, lyrical, vocally propelled folk/pop with subtle jazz underpinnings buoyed by everything from organ to flugelhorn to trumpet. Yup, that’s a mouthful. But Taken by Surprise has many moods, vibes, and constituent parts.
Join Weekes on her journey above and stay tuned for the rest of Taken By Surprise when it arrives Jan. 20.
