Kyp Harness shares video for “Sweet Release” from self-titled album out Oct. 19!
One of Canada’s truly under-appreciated singer/songwriters Kyp Harness returns on Oct. 19 with his fourteenth album, simply entitled Kyp Harness, a collection of nine timely observations of our fraying society, rendered with all the wit, wisdom and just the right amount of folk-rocking flair that Kyp’s die-hard fans have come to expect. The album’s crackling energy is the result of the tracks being laid down during a single all-day session at Toronto’s Revolution Recording, with Joao Carvalho capturing the chemistry generated by Kyp, the renowned pianist Tania Gill, bassist Mike Smith and drummer Sean Lancaric.
We’re proud to offer an early taste with the Southern Souls video for “Sweet Release,” one of the album’s standout tracks. He officially launches the album, along with his new novel The Abandoned (Nightwood Editions) on Saturday, Oct. 27 at Toronto’s Tranzac Club.
If you aren’t familiar with Kyp Harness, then you’ve been missing one of the most important bodies of work any Canadian singer-songwriter has amassed over the past 25 years. With each new release, media outlets have hailed him as a genius, and his songs have been covered by Ron Sexsmith, Daniel Lanois and Mary Margaret O’Hara, among others. Sexsmith has called Kyp, “my favourite songwriter. It’s his lyrics that set him apart. They are every bit as powerful as the best Dylan, Cohen and Lennon combined.”
The range of his songwriting chops is fully displayed on standout tracks such as “Talking To Myself,” “Angel Mine” and “Insomniac Lullaby,” but it’s on “Hard Life,” “The Sea Monster” and “Jungle Out There” that Kyp unflinchingly illuminates the dysfunction at the heart of our society.
It’s hard to discount the weight of experience on Kyp’s current work, but his worldview hasn’t changed much since he released his debut album in 1991. However, the goal of every true artist is to boil their creativity down to its essence, so it’s hardly a surprise that at this point in his evolution Kyp Harness has chosen to present his new album simply under his own name—one that deserves to be spoken with the same reverence as Canada’s other great songwriters.