It always starts with the music. Kim Albert didn’t pick up a guitar until she had a song to write. Growing up in a household full of the traditional fiddle tunes of her self-taught dad, she has been performing music since a childhood. Marked by the untimely loss of her mother at the age of eight, her haunting, pared-down folk songs are steeped in love and loss. She crafts music as mindful meditation in a daily practice of acceptance, self-exploration and forgiveness. The result is a personal, revealing interpretation of the fallibility and wonders of what makes us human.

 

Her first album released in 2022, Between Now and the Memories, was a product of the pandemic and recorded at Wild Studio in St-Zénon over the course of a weekend with the help of Philippe Girard (guitarist and co-producer) and musicians Maude Bastien (drums), Eli Davidovici (bass), Thanya Iyer (keys and violin) and Rémi Giguère (sound engineering).

 

Her sophomore record, To Hold it All, gets its title from the loss of a friend who left behind kids who were the age Kim had been when she lost her mother. Experiencing mourning through the eyes of those kids made her realize just how empty the platitudes we offer the bereaved are. The song helped her come to terms with the fact that love and loss, beauty and pain are intertwined -- sides of the same coin; that grief is not something to be gotten over but rather something with which one learns to coexist.  

Cédric Dind-Lavoie joined the original cast of musicians on To Hold It All. The album was released in August, 2023.