best of 2024 • Little Kid • Bad Energy

On Little Kid’s new album and Orindal Records debut A Million Easy Payments, the urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics, epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection. The band’s lilting folk rock arrangements carry Boothby’s stories, occasionally lifting them skyward with flurries of cello samples, pedal steel, flute, and electric piano. It’s a record of depression and frustration that doesn’t stew in piety or aestheticize pain, that also explodes with life. Fragile and abundant. It’s a record with blood in its veins.

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in occupied palestine

near the birthsite of christ

caught some footage that you wouldn't believe

that night on channel 7

ran a slanted segment

through the midwest on the mid-middle east

but you’ve told me how

you keep your volume down

cause all that's coming from your humming tv

is bad energy

“Bad Energy” is a song with many verses. Each verse talks about the concept of “bad energy” from a different angle. My overall goal with this song was to implicate Christianity – or, at least, the twisted, Americanized version of it that I grew up with – in a lot of the evil going on in our world: war, genocide, rape culture, capitalist greed, resource exploitation, climate change… There is some personal stuff in there, and some pretty universal stuff.

I was pretty preoccupied with form when I wrote this one (and the other long ones on the record), and I think I was pulling a lot from Bob Dylan’s approach to his longest, most repetitive songs. David Byrne summed it up well: Dylan lifted the style of his “epic songs… from old folk ballads with their many many verses, but then he added a genetic mutation to the form — surreal imagery and metaphors rather than the traditional narratives of the old ballads” (from this Stereogum feature on Bob’s 80th birthday). I think Gillian Welch’s “I Dream A Highway” (my favourite song) might do this even better than Dylan’s best ones did. StereoGum