Mo Kenney's self-titled, debut album gets 10 year anniversary vinyl re-issue

When The Coast reaches Mo Kenney on a June afternoon, they’re on break from soundcheck. Their five-week European tour is wrapping up soon—but tonight, the singer-songwriter is performing the Netherlands stop. It’s been a decade since Kenney dropped their self-titled debut album (“It feels like that record came out maybe four years ago—but it definitely doesn’t feel like 10 years,” they say), making their brand of sonically vulnerable, Elliot Smith-indebted confessional sound a multiple-award-winning, globally-in-demand commodity.

A re-issue of Kenney’s eponymous debut has been released at Taz Records to mark its milestone anniversary—a move that finally sees a vinyl version available for purchase, and makes the record’s sun-dappled strumming and addictive melodies all the more worth revisiting, this time in hi-fi.

Kenney still remembers how it felt showing up at New Scotland Yard to collaborate and record with Dartmouth legend Joel Plaskett: “I was like ‘Oh, shit.’ Because I had been a fan of his music all through high school: Me and my friends listen to Joel Plaskett all the time,” Kenney says. “I had always wanted to play music in a professional capacity. And to have Joel liking what I was working on and helping me—and just feeling like I was on the cusp of something really cool—felt really good. I was only 20 years old, or 21, when we started working on that record—so I felt like the world was my oyster, kind of.”

While their music leaned away from the acoustic-soaked focus of their debut over ensuing albums—”The Details was more of a rock record, so that was a total departure from my first two,” Kenney says, referencing her 2017 LP—these days, they say a stripped-down live set has her returning to her sonic roots: “On this tour, I’ve been playing a lot of stuff from that [first] record. And it’s interesting how far away I feel from those songs now: Like, some of those songs I wrote when I was a teenager. That was a long time ago now,” Kenney adds. “I’m definitely a completely different person than I was when I wrote the songs, so it’s interesting to still be playing them after all this time.”