When listening to Jenny Berkel’s soft-edged LP, 2022’s These Are The Sounds Left From Leaving, the ripe-fruit taste of melancholy takes hold of your tongue. You’re pre-nostalgic for a heartache that hasn’t happened yet, walking around the rooms of your mind’s house while sunlight streams in.
Written before the pandemic—and before Berkel swapped Toronto, where she’s been a folk scene fixture since the 2010s for Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia—it is a record that plumbs the depths of one’s interior, unearthing airy arrangements that recall The Reminder-era Feist.
When I reach Berkel by phone days before her June 9th Halifax show (happening at The Bus Stop Theatre with fellow folk artist Abigail Lapell), I begin to tell her I’ve mentally filed These Are The Sounds alongside the deeply introspective book Journal of a Solitude. “Do you mean May Sarton?” she asks, our voices overlapping in shared excitement. (Berkel read a copy of the diary that fellow neo-folk fire-starter Jennah Barry lent her a couple years back.) “I like that, I like side-by-side in your mind a lot.” She says the album came from “a really, really insular time”: A move to a new city that saw her having to rebuild a social circle. “I just was really alone, but in what felt like a really positive and productive solitude. I think pretty much every song was written in that apartment by myself.”
In a world of overstimulated too-much-ness, it’s a welcome dose of sparse—a come-down from the constant-caffeine state COVID has left us in. Across 10 tracks, it’s the long exhale you’ve been needing since March 2020.
“I think on all my albums prior to this album, all the songs have a very clear beginning and end and that’s great,” Berkel, who counts Joni Mitchell amongst her biggest influences, says. “But I just wanted this album to have some songs, some sonic spaces, that were just feeling— without lyrics.”
See Berkel June 9 at The Bus Stop Theatre (2203 Gottingen Street) with Abigail Lapell at 7pm (details here)—and don’t worry, there’ll still be lots of infectious lyrics to sing along to, too.
This article appears in Jun 1-30, 2022.
