Words & images by Jess Laicy

I woke up Monday morning fully prepared to shoot Kenzie Coyne‘s (vocals/guitar in Hello Luna) show at Rambling House. What I wasn’t prepared for was our Managing Editor (who was going to review the show) getting sick and me having to take his place doing the write up as well.

He knows I hate writing… why, oh why would he make me do it last minute and unprepared at that!?!

The good thing about it was, now I had to pay attention. I’m not saying I don’t pay attention when I shoot a show, but I do just that; pay more attention to the shots I’m getting, than normally to the music I’m hearing.

Kenzie’s show at Rambling House was a first for me. I’ve never seen her, or her band, before and I knew absolutely nothing walking into the venue. What I soon found out was I really enjoy her angsty yet soulful style. She did a stripped-down set of 12 songs, six acoustic and six electric tunes, with a question and answer segment at the end.

She sang and told the backstories of some of the songs; and the one that stood out for me was Fabrics. It’s a song Kenzie wrote about friends she has lost due to losing their battle with mental illness. As she sang, it was almost as if you could hear the pain of her losing them all over again.

As a person who suffers from two mental illnesses, I know the battle I face every day. But what I haven’t given thought to is the people on the other side who care about me.  Listening to her sing Fabrics put a whole new spin on it for me.

Music does that, and it is part of the reason why I love it so much. It’s great when you can share a moment or have someone’s point of view make you see something differently. Or maybe even think, hey I’m not alone, someone else gets it.

She opened the question and answer segment with a very important question, Popeye’s or Chick-fil-A?  While I disagree wholeheartedly with her answer of Chick-fil-A, I enjoyed listening to her talk about getting her start in high school by first playing ukulele and moving up from there. When she talked about where her inspiration comes from, she hit another cord for me. She stated that “music is emotion” and a lot of what she writes come from things she’s gone through, which you can most definitely feel in her songs. 

I ended the night with a brief chat and told her that because of her set, I totally needed to check out Hello Luna now, and if that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about her show, I did my job wrong…

Setlist

1. Monsters

2. Rip Out My Brain

3. Every Time

4. Paper Thin Skin

5. Forced Thought

6. Stitching Holes

7. Full Blame

Electric set

8. Lifeboat

9. Underwater

10. Fabrics

11. Empathy

12. Tongue Tied