The Awakeners will be coming home to Cortes at the end of July. They will be playing at Gorge Hall on Friday July 28, and Mansons Hall the following day.
“We are excited that we’ll have a brand new album with us,” said Immanuel McKenty.
“It was mostly recorded on Cortes Island and the majority of the songs were also written while we were on Cortes. The album will also be for sale at the Cortes Natural Food Co-op, as well as at our concerts,” added his brother Francis McKenty.
This is the beginning of a two part series about that ‘nomadic tribe of multi-instrumentalist songwriters (most of whom are siblings)’ called the Awakeners. We talk a great deal about their album and where most of the songs were written. In part two, which airs next week, we will go to their home in Willow Point, Campbell River.
As they agreed to let Cortes Currents broadcast some of the songs, I asked what was their favourite. This prompted a long discussion, as most of them said do not have a favourite
Immanuel said, “Starting To Become’ is one of my favourites on the album. It’s one that Francis wrote while we were staying at Hollyhock and recorded while we were living there.”
His father, Robert McKenty, agreed, “If we had a lead song for the album, it’d be called that.”
Robert McKenty: “There’s 19 songs and a couple of them are instrumentals, one of which is fiddle and the other is a very classical sounding piano. There’s folk songs, there’s ones that sound like a big crowd singing along. There’s funny ones like ‘Teen Freak’ or ‘Think,’ and then there’s sobering ones like ‘What A Man Can Be.’
Immanuel McKenty: “A lot of the songs on the album are a result of what we did instead of touring when COVID happened. We were living at Hollyhock at the time and redirected our energies towards recording. For a long time, we were sending a brand new song out to our email newsletter once a week as our musical challenge and a way to stay inspired and connected with our audience while we were confined to one small area of land and house.”
Erica Giannone explained, “It was pretty neat to have something going out every week. I think it gathered some nice momentum and people had something to look forward to in their inbox. A lot of the people on our newsletter are people all around the world that we’ve connected with over years and years of travel. So it was always pretty special to have the responses coming in and connecting with people again, even though we weren’t able to get out on the road.”
Immanuel McKenty: “It was quite a fun challenge too, because we weren’t necessarily planning to keep doing it when we started, but it picked up momentum until we were doing it every week and taking it fairly seriously. We would have a pretty intense couple of days leading up to Friday. We would always send out our song usually on Friday night. So we would be in our recording room for hours and hours on usually Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, getting all the tracks in and mixing it in. Then we were doing artwork for each song.”
“The songs were all written by different people, and we tried to rotate around, so we were sending out some of everyone’s songs, and often the songwriter would write some text about what the song was related to that would go out in the newsletter and also come up with some sort of artwork idea that they or somebody else would design and put together to go out with it.”
Francis McKenty: “We didn’t really finish those recordings in a lot of cases. We sent them out to our newsletter in a rough draft format and had them on our Awakeneers music streaming app and some of them we also distributed commercially, but we never had them on a CD until this spring. We went in and we remixed and tuned up all those recordings and added some tracks to some of them and polished them up and finally are releasing them as an album along with some that nobody has heard yet.”
“A lot of our friends from Cortes called in recordings of singing on the chorus of a song called ‘Stand Up for Life,’ that has a huge choral sound with a whole lot of people singing on it, which nobody has heard yet, including the people that sang on it. So that’s quite exciting.”
Rose Giannone added, “There’s actually people from Sweden, India and all over the world singing on it.”
Robert McKenty: “There’s one that’s called ‘Wise Woman,’ that’s about the only surviving grandmother that we have as a relation right now. There’s one ‘Tatla Lake to Trail’, which is about the amazing gift of living in BC and particularly the part of the world that we’re in. There’s one that’s called ‘May I Be,’ which is a wish to live in harmony and right relation with everybody and everything. Then the last one is a beautiful piano piece called ‘Dancer of the Gods,’ which was written after we’d seen a very unusual dancer present at the Parliament of World Religions in Toronto who came, I believe, just after our presentation at the closing plenary.
Immanuel McKenty: The second last track is ‘Walk in the Light,’ which is an acapella prayer and it’s one that we haven’t really released as a recording before. I think it’s very inspiring and has a good message of perseverance as well as optimism and a certain sensitiveness.”
Francis McKenty: “It’s also fun to have a song that’s strictly voices mixed in with songs that have a lot of instruments in them, and it has a lot of fun harmonies.”
Robert McKenty: “There’s a lot of lyrical content in the songs that are on here. I think we’re all inspired by all these songs at one time or another, including the one that’s a beautiful waltz. It’s called ‘Lone Waltz’ and the first time we played it was during COVID over at Hollyhock near the beach. One of the siblings was dancing by himself, out on the grass as if he was waltzing, with no particular partner but he had his arms out as if he was. It was symbolic of the times and there was something quite miraculous about being able to enjoy the circumstance. That particular song is a violin duet that Immanuel and Francis played, that we all provided back up to.
Immanuel McKenty: It was also quite a fun song to write and an unusual way that it came about, which Francis and I collaborated on without ever actually playing it. Francis wrote the first half of the song directly down on staff and posted it up on the wall of our room. We were sharing a room at the time, and I think he mentioned it to me. He also wrote the title on the top of the staff, the sheet music piece of paper. I took the challenge, took the music off of the wall and wrote the second half down in note form on the sheet. Then we played it together and recorded it together, which was quite a lot of fun. Everyone else came up with parts and joined in on it.
Music credits for podcast:
- ‘Starting to Become,’ (June 2021) ’Walk in the Light’ (Nov 2020) and ’Lone Waltz’ (Mar 2021) are taken from Awakeneers: The Album, 2023
Concerts in July 2023
- Jul 8, Saturday: 39 Days of July Festival, Duncan BC, 6:00pm.
- Jul 15 & 16th: Vancouver Island Musicfest, Courtenay BC.
- Jul 22, Saturday: Album release concert, Sybil Andrews Cottage, Campbell River BC, 7:00pm.
- Jul 28, Friday: Gorge Hall, Cortes Island BC, 8:00pm.
- Jul 29, Saturday: Mansons Hall, Cortes Island BC, 8:00pm.
Links of Interest:
- RLH – The Awakeneers (P2): Lost in the Goat Trails
- The Awakeneers website
- The Awakeneers Music App
- AA – Awakeneers concert on Cortes Island ‘a homecoming’– repost from CKTZ News (Dec 13, 2023)
- MAG – Folk U Radio celebrates 50 with the Awakaneers(Jun 19, 2021)
- RLH – The Merry McKentys Return Home On Tour – Cortes Currents (Jul 9, 2019)
Top image credit:Zoom interview with Roy Hales of Cortes Currents – Photo courtesy the Awakeneers
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