“Evening Dream” – Mo Kenney

Everything about “Evening Dream,” in all its toe-tapping melancholy, speaks to attentive craft and artful detail; this is one structurally sound, melodically incisive, smartly produced song. Look how easily the listener is swept in, first with the crisp acoustic strums and then a quickly introduced verse that barely allows the singer a breath, employing an unbroken stream of trochaic rhythm to accentuate a sense of movement. (A trochee is the opposite of an iamb: ONE-two, ONE-two versus one-TWO one-TWO.) Note if you will how the single place at which the opening verse allows for a breath follows the phrase “evening dreams”–and that this, in turn, is the only time the title presents itself in the song. Most pop songs, conversely, pretty much pound their titles into your head–or, in any case, utilize as a title the most often repeated phrase in the song. While doing it as Kenney does here may not guarantee the quality of a song, I’ll suggest that songwriters who know and care enough to use this device are a self-selected group of thoughtful artists, likely to be creating thoughtful, worthwhile art.

So the chorus doesn’t give birth to the title. What it does do, smartly, is offer up a metrical contrast to the verse: as opposed to the run-on vibe created by the relentless trochees, the chorus consists of two lines of clipped, two-syllable chunks (these appear to be called spondees, but I definitely had to look that up). The chorus ends with one more metrical shift as Kenney sings “I can take/I can take care of myself.” That this ultimately becomes the most repeated phrase in the song but is not the title suggests, however subtly, that the song’s narrator is actually not quite so sure about taking care of themself. Later, the second time through, the chorus leads us into some elegant bass lines and a wistful bridge–because of course this well-constructed song has a bridge. Don’t get me started on the vanishing art of the bridge.

Kenney is a singer/songwriter based in Nova Scotia. “Evening Dream” is the first track made available from their fifth album, From Nowhere, which is slated for a September release. You can check out the Kenney discography on Bandcamp.

photo credit: Matt Horseman