An artist who is unafraid of revealing to the world the struggles they have in grappling with the day-to-day complexities of life, of love, of relationships and their own sense of self through their music is rare gem. To show that kind of courage and openness, to bare one’s soul and spirit through their meaning of their music – be it heartbreak, anxiety, the darker thoughts and the lighter thoughts, makes for a compelling listening experience.
Such is the case with Edmonton-born singer/songwriter Danielle Knibbe, whose second album, The Ribcage & The Heart is set to be released on March 1. It is a collection of 11 songs with an unpredictability of tone and tenor, but united by a powerful honesty and emotional authenticity that is as profound as it is poetic. Knibbe has always used the medium of her talent with words and melodies as a method for processing the feelings and thoughts that awash her heart and head. And, as with any artist of any significance, the hope is that these songs and their sentiments, will resonate with all who listen and perhaps give expression or even help folks process their own inner battles or inner triumphs.
Knibbe’s vocal performances mirror the emotional depth and complexity of the songs, as the dynamic shifts sometimes jarringly from quiet introspection to her belting it out as if uncorking an emotional gusher. The voice and the candour are the sinews that give a sense of aural consistency, though, giving the listener a sense that they are on a journey.
“The bottom line for everything we do as a band is to serve the song first. So, even though we went to the Banff Centre to work on it and had all this time to do production, we always asked ourselves what does this story need, how do we tell this story in every aspect of the recording? It’s almost like musical theatre in the sense that we want to make sure that the lyrics and the story of the song are first and foremost, but that the tone of the music is such that even if people never really absorb the lyrics, they come away knowing what the emotion is underlying it and what I am trying to get across,” said Knibbe, who now lives in Toronto with her husband Connor Walsh, who is also her collaborator and bassist. Half the album was in fact recorded at the Banff Centre, with the rest recorded at Marquee Sound in Toronto. Her guitarist Bryn Besse produced the album, with Knibbe and Walsh acting as co-producers.
“All of our production choices, all of my vocal choices, all the things I chose to do or not to do on a song were done with a lot of thought. I always want to make sure that I am doing justice to the story I am trying to tell and the emotion I am trying to convey, and I hope that comes across.”
One of the coolest things about The Ribcage & The Heart is the fact that there are five pairs of songs on the album that are linked thematically in some way. Having pairs of songs that act as counterpoints to one another based on the same theme or emotion was not a contrived tactical decision or ‘gimmick’ but something that came about organically through the process of writing the album.
“I kind of stumbled into it. I knew that I wanted to name the album The Ribcage & The Heart for a while. It’s a line from one of the songs and I really liked it and I liked the imagery and I liked the song that it came from. We went through the list of songs I wanted to record and talked about which ones we wanted to do, and as I was looking through the list, I could see I was writing about a lot of the same things over and over, like writing about relationships, writing about mental illness, writing about insecurity,” Knibbe explained.
“And then just by listening and really thinking about it I realized there was this really sharp contrast of how I was talking about these emotions and how I was expressing these emotions. I like to spend a lot of time thinking about what I am feeling and thinking about why I am feeling what I am feeling and I always find it really fascinating, throughout years of counselling and years of being someone who needs to talk about my emotions, how easy it is to be ignorant of what you’re feeling and to have all these other things kind of getting in the way of what is actually going on.
“So, for this album I got excited about exploring that and showing how, when we struggle when we’re not being honest, what are the emotions that rush in to take that place. And in a lot of the songs on the album, it seems noticeable to me anyways, or what I was going for, quite often it was anger or aggression or defensive behaviour that takes of the space of being vulnerable because it’s a little bit easier. This album was an expression of that, of the struggle of that kind of dichotomy of defensiveness versus vulnerability.”
Two pairs of songs have already been released as virtual double A sides from the album as EPs. The most recent is entitled Insecurity and encompasses the truly heartfelt and plaintive songs Long Distance and Footnote, drawn from the conflicting feelings she experienced during the early stage of her relationship with her then boyfriend, and now husband Connor.
“Saying what you need from someone else is very difficult and I think I always want to come across like the cool girl who is super independent and that I don’t need anybody. And when we did the long distance thing after he moved to Toronto from Alberta, that was a really jarring experience for me because I realized that I was a little needier than I thought I would be and more jealous than I thought I would be; so that’s where Long Distance came from. If I had the emotional maturity that I had now I could have probably taken a step back at the time and said, ‘man I am just insecure, I just need to accept things the way they are.’ But I couldn’t and I got a little crazy during that time period. So, that was an interesting song to write in that it was me trying to express that panicked feeling that I had over and over during that one year of long distance. I don’t know how people do it for years and years at a time,” Knibbe said.
“Footnote was really easy to write but is always very hard to perform because it’s insecurity about yourself, insecurity in relationship. It’s not very nice to talk about, it’s a lot to put out there night after night. So, if we’re playing a loud bar, I don’t play that song because it’s a tender spot for me. I think I find if difficult sometimes to say on stage, ‘I am worried that you won’t love me forever. I am worried that I am just the same as someone else that you have loved before.’
“It is about my husband and was something I was struggling with a lot earlier in our relationship and now that we’re married there’s a little bit more of a sense of security. But there is still just a scary feeling where I am wondering about him, ‘you said you loved this person you were involved with in your past. So, you said, ‘I love you’ to someone else before you said it to me, and now you don’t love that person and you don’t know what they’re doing and where they are,’ and I put myself in that place, which is scary. Nobody goes into a relationship thinking they are never going to talk to this person again. We always have the best intentions and we all truly love the person when we are with them. Lots of us also have had people in our lives that we loved and now we don’t, so that’s a very overwhelming thing to have to think about night after night, although I am overwhelmed by my emotions constantly anyways.”
The first pair of songs based on the them of Infatuation, were released back in November and include the songs Agony and Simple Love.
“When I was younger, I was the type of person where I would get obsessed with boys. Agony is about how I sort of stalked my husband for maybe a year and a half in university before he knew I existed. I would go home at the end of the school day and be like ‘oh, he looked at me. He talked to me.’ I used to do this thing where I would sit directly in his eyeline when he would have performances at school, so he had to look at me while he was playing,” Knibbe said.
“Agony is about the feeling of, ‘oh my goodness, this person needs to be with me.’ What was really going on and what was really scary underneath all of that is that Connor, as I got to know him, I realized I was genuinely falling for him, and I did think he was a great person to be with. Agony is like covering up the fear of actually being interested in someone with jokes and being over the top. Simple Love kind of picks up from there as its about the understanding that it’s happened and I didn’t even realize it was happening and no matter how this goes I am going to be hurt in some way, which is the scary thing about love. Either it’s going to work out but then I am always going to be a little unsure, or it’s not going to work out and I will be alone.”
In a way Insecurity and Infatuation are intertwined as it is our feelings of insecurity and lack of self confidence that lead to the agony of longing and the possible heartache of love.
“It’s terrifyingly powerful and it’s the root of a lot of problems in my own life as well. There’s always the fear, too, that the more you show to someone, the more reasons they have to not want to stick around. It’s always this weird balance of wanting them to know me but I also don’t want them to know me. And the interesting thing about being with Connor is that up until that point, I always loved the idea of meeting a person than the reality of dating them. Because it’s much more fun to think about what could happen than to actually be in the situation and have some risks and have some personal feelings at stake,” she said, as she briefly explained the three other thematic pairs on The Ribcage & The Heart.
“There are two songs about mental illness, either my experience with it my family’s experience with it, and those are Better For Us Both and Reminders. And then there is a song called Absence of You and Feel Like This, which are both love songs: the first one is a little more grandiose in the way that it talks about love but Feel Like This is a little more up front about love and how scary it cane be and how it doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do. The other two are Northern Cardinal and I could Be the One for You. But you’ll see there are 11 songs on the album and there is one song After Her, which is the song where the album title comes from. It’s an outlier in several ways, the most obvious being that it is on its own.
“I wrote it about an old man after he loses his wife, which is very different from the rest of the record tonally and because it isn’t in the first person. It comes near the end of the album and it came during one of the moments when I was in the songwriter residency program at the Banff Centre, where a lot of the material for this album got its start and where it was recorded, when I was getting discouraged. I had this song and I showed it to one of the mentors there, who was a Nashville heavyweight, and she really loved it and it was kind of the catalyst moment where I realized I could still write music. So, I wanted to keep it on the album for that reason and because I think it’s a special song on its own. And there’s also a part of me that didn’t want the pairs idea to overtake the whole album. So, the songs are connected in very subtle ways and they are not always paired up sequentially on the album.”
Undoubtedly audiences will get ‘the feels’ by listening to the album, but those ‘feels’ will be even more impactful upon hearing the songs in a live setting. Knibbe is doing a short tour of Canada in March, beginning March 1 with a hometown album release party in Edmonton, following by shows on successive nights in Canmore and Calgary before heading to Saskatoon on March 6. After a short break, she and her bandmates will do a run in Ontario including March 22 in Thornbury, March 23 in Collingwood, March 24 in Uxbridge, followed by shows in Toronto on March 27 at Hugh’s Room and at The Mulespinner in Hamilton on March 29. More shows are being booked, and Knibbe said she hopes to get over to the U.K. and Europe later in the year.
For more information on The Ribcage & The Heart, and upcoming tour dates, visit Knibbe’s website at http://www.danielleknibbe.ca.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for a quarter of a century. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
SHARE THIS POST:
