Meet Your Next Favorite Indie Band in Little Kid
Little Kid drops highly anticipated EP this summer.
Happy Hump Day music fans,
Little Kid is a band in Toronto that comprises of Kenny Boothby, Paul Vroom, Megan Lunn, Liam Cole, and Brodie Germain. Kenny is the original founder of the band and they’re who we interviewed.
They’ve been gaining some steam in 2020—doubling their monthly Spotify plays to over 30,000 streams today.
Not only are they hot, but it’s justified when you listen to their music. Little Kid’s Goat makes me feel like I’m on a road trip driving through a meadow. The same thing will happen to you when you listen to that. And Two Invitations. And The Fifth.
Before we get to that, we have some news you cannot miss.
Riff Releases
Aussie band Odlaw releases indie rock album Debut
LA-based Phoebe Bridgers releases indie rock single Stranger in the Alps
Detroit-based T3 drops beat tape The Cook Up
Aimee Oliver, founder of Harriers of Discord, released this new playlist. Give it a listen, especially if you’re on the road.
Little Kid Info
Give it up for Little Kid!
The Riff: When did you first start getting into music?
Kenny: So I grew up in [Petrolia, Ontario] and lived there until I finished high school. So that was like a small town upbringing. And I started playing. I played piano when I was really young. But I didn't really take to it. I didn't like it too much. It was really structured, like sheet music kind of learning. And then I wanted to learn guitar when I was I think in grade six. And kind of wanted to play more rock music then and I got a guitar teacher who taught me just more chords and tablature.
I picked up the guitar around then but it kind of unlocked for me actually, like I grew up going to church and there was a pastor that at the one church he taught me the circle of fifths. Another man who played on the worship team who would play bass taught me a few patterns that were starting to click for me that there are all these patterns in music and so music theory was was a part of it, but it's kind of more informal. And there's an interesting thing with learning church music because I played in the church band for my whole, like youth and into adulthood. And that's kind of where I learned how to play.
It was interesting because it is kind of an unstructured environment in a way at least in a Pentecostal church that I went to. There's a free form kind of thing that goes on with that kind of music, which is neat. But it's all based in folk chords and traditional kind of chord structures. My music is really tied to that to that, to that church upbringing that's basically where I learned how to play.
The Riff: Is this style of playing—free forming the music—what you do now with Little Kid? Or do you write formally first?
Kenny: It's not far off because I would say we play folk music or country music—at least on some level—and that a lot of that is kind of what Christian hymns are; these kinds of these similar chord progressions. So I see that aspect for sure.
But yeah, there's this free flow kind of thing. I don't know what other contexts you see this I guess maybe jazz music. Where you go into it, having a rough idea of the song, but maybe something's going to happen that you didn't expect in terms of someone's solo, you know, takes us into a different direction, this kind of thing. In church, we had these parts—like we had the verse, verse, chorus, verse chorus, we knew these chords, and we knew the words, but what was kind of unique was the way you responded to what's happening in the church. So in a sense, the audience is kind of playing a role too, because they're singing with you. And this is the thing that I'm like, where else does this happen?
The Riff: Is playing at church your only musical experience outside of Little Kid?
Kenny: No, I played in bands in high school.
They were just goofy bands though. We had a band where we looked at the genres on MySpace or some site and saw math rock. When I was 14, I didn't know what Math Rock was but we thought that was a funny name for a genre. So, we made a band that sang math songs and it was a rock band. It was weird because I had a couple friends I went to elementary school with and then we came into high school, and we connected with all these other friends. It turned out we all were doing the same shit for the last few years or we were all in bands, which is really weird to think because we're just in this small town. So, my students are maybe 13 or 14 and if I found out this kid was with his buddies on the weekend recording whatever the hell songs with a little computer mic, I would say, “that's pretty weird, this weird little guy,” but somehow they were. There were 10 or so of my friends who all were doing that shit and we would play shows but they were just weird; whatever the heck shows we can get. I remember playing at some fundraiser for a horse farm and the family was trying to raise money for it. It was at the Lions Club.
So, I played music but it was not sincere, it was just to make my friends laugh. So that was years and years, it wasn't until I was maybe 20 that I actually wrote a song that I liked or expressed something true to me. It was good practice, in a sense because I had all this time and I mean, this has parallels with my own life, too. I feel like I have a way of trying to distance myself from things through humor or ironic distance, until I can admit that there's a real feeling there and I can express that. That's basically what my musical path was too but once I started with Little Kid, essentially that's been my only real project since then; so it's been like 10 years. If I write songs I'm thinking, “Are they going to be Little Kid songs?” So it's assumed they will be Little Kid songs.
The Riff: So you were basically 20 years old, you got to the ironic point of your musical career, which is really the beginning of your musical career when you realize, “Oh,I could actually do this” or “Oh, I actually have a serious feeling for this.” So how much time did it take from that moment when you were 20, until when you first formed Little Kid with your mates?
Kenny: The first song I wrote was a song called “Train” and it's the last song on the first Little Kid album called Logic Songs. In that whole first album, it is just me so Little Kid was just my alias for a one person project at first. Basically, when I started writing serious songs right away from that first one, they were Little Lid songs. So, the album Logic Songs are basically just the first 10 songs I wrote. I think there's maybe two songs I wrote that I didn't include on that album. But basically, you can see my whole songwriting process is across the albums and you see more people collaborating with me as it goes to the second album as Brody joined the band. He helps with recording and mixes everything which makes it sound a little better. Also, the dynamics are greater because he plays drums and so on and then Paul joins us on the next record, and he's now producing everything for us. Actually, now that I think about it, album wise, it's me on the first one, there's two of us on the second one, there's more like three of us on the second one that makes things on the fourth one and then she's full-time on the fifth one and Liam joins us on the sixth one. So each album it’s getting a little bigger with the collaboration but I think you can see a growth to the songs, in terms of the quality. I prefer our later stuff but basically, everything's been recorded. In my whole life time writing songs, there have been five or six songs I wrote that I didn't end up putting on the album. So yes, it’s all there.
The Riff: So you're really not afraid to release most of the content that you end up making?
Kenny: Yeah, I think it's because I don't finish something unless I like it. I feel like I have a lot of ideas, so what's not out there to listen to is my voice memos on my phone or whatever I used to do before I carried the phone around everywhere. But, I have hundreds of voicemails in my phone and in the end it'll be just like playing guitar and I feel a little spark or something that might feel like it could be a song or feels like there's a melody there. Then I'll record it and leave that on the phone for a while, and sometimes I'll listen back and I'll give them a name if some little string of lyrics was coming with it or something or some identifier to know that that was one I liked rather than just being “New Song Number Nine” or whatever they probably get saved as.
So yeah, I get a sense quickly enough if this is going to be worth making into a song and then if I actually sit and make the song, I usually end up liking it enough to put it on the album. But in rare cases, it hasn't really fitted or we've decided it was not the strongest one.
The Riff: So it was 2008 or 2009 when your first album came out?
Kenny: The first song I recorded was in 2009 and then it took until 2011 to finish the album. So 2011 was the first release of ours .
The Riff: This was already when MySpace was dying already so what was the musical internet like at that time?
Kenny: MySpace was still around, but you're right that it was not as popular, but I feel like there was still a niche of bands were still on there. I had my music up there at first and then a friend of mine sent me his music on Bandcamp in probably 2010. Actually, I'm picturing where I was living when I'm thinking he sent that, so it might have been 2008 or 20009. I don't know when Bandcamp started, but it maybe was 2009 that I first heard of it. So Bandcamp was where I thought that this is a great site, in terms of the flexibility of it and it's still true. It hasn't changed very much, which is interesting, but it's been 10 years and it's still serving its need very well, if not better. So when I found that I'm like, “This is a good site and I like that you could customize things and I could customize the look of it and include the booklets and these sorts of things with the download.
But in terms of what the internet was like, there was a lot more blogs and it was a great time and for me, because I didn't have high speed internet when I was in high school even. It wasn't until I moved to the bigger city to go school that I finally did and that was an era for me where I could all of a sudden download stuff if I wanted to hear it, I could hear it. It was so simple back then in a way, like you just type.
This interview was edited for concision and clarity.
Photos of Little Kid by Will Cox. (@wllcx on Instagram)
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