Quebec songwriter Mia Kelly’s musical journey leaves her voice, gorgeous in both French and English, hanging nakedly over a cliff of scant instrumentation. But with a voice like Kelly’s, you don’t need too much courage to leave your vocals exposed.
Kelly, who hails from Gatineau, started getting serious about her music when she was 14. Just a couple of years later, she was all in, funding her first project.
“I was waitressing and doing a ton of house concerts,” Kelly says from her home province. “I didn’t pitch it that way, but everyone knew [the money] was going directly towards an EP I was making, and I was paying my musicians, paying the producers, paying for my album art to be done. There’re so many expenses that come with a project like that.”
Her luscious voice gained wider fans with her 2022 debut album, Garden Through the War.
She was gigging in Estonia with her manager this year when she learned she’d been named the Emerging Artist of the Year at the Canadian Folk Music Awards. “It’s so validating of all these years of work. I really dedicated myself to this career wholeheartedly.
“My music has been taking me to so many really wicked and random places [lately]. This time last year, I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo for two weeks for the Francophone Games. I was their representative of Canada, which is pretty awesome and such an odd and amazing position to be in, and an amazing experience to be surrounded by other musicians from around the world, and athletes.”
Kelly got the travel bug while exploring places with her family, then finished two years of post-secondary schooling.
“I decided to take a gap year, which turned into a gap life. I recorded a full-length album, then went to Chile backpacking for six weeks, then wanted to learn to surf so I went to Nicaragua for three months, then Costa Rica after that. I just learned so much about myself and made so many connections and those experiences and that growing turned into this album.” The new album, To Be Clear, comes out on October 4.
“A lot of the songs are inspired by real stories, whether they’re my own or stories of people I’ve met along the way. Some of them are like twisted — themes I’ve experienced in my life that I’ve twisted into stories. A lot of them are experience-based or second-hand experience-based where someone has told me their lived experience of hardship.”
One of these songs, “Bonefish Boys,” leads off the upcoming album.
“It’s a song about a man who lived in the Navy. I met him in Nicaragua, and he told me all about his life in the British Navy in the ‘60s. We spent a lot of time and he told me all about his life in the Navy. Some of the lyrics from that song are direct pull quotes from our conversations together that I remember writing down as we chatted and then sneaking them into a song later.
“So, it’s borrowed stories and also digging up some of my own, being really vulnerable, and it all just sort of spills out whenever I’m not looking.”
As for the irony of earning an emerging artist award while she has been seriously gigging since she was 14, Kelly is open-hearted. “I love the way it’s going. It’s slow and really organic, and it doesn’t feel rushed or anything. So, my career has grown with me, and it feels like a nice progression.”
Mia Kelly plays The King Eddy November 1 and with The Good Lovelies at Festival Hall November 16. She appears in 2025 with Stephen Fearing at River Park Church March 22.
