“Oh it hurts so much to care / It hurts to let you go
Grieving in the open air / Need help to know I’m whole”

Breaking Ground (Kendall Patrick)

Kendall Patrick is a Vancouver Island-based singer/songwriter who utilizes her abundant musical gifts to inspire and enlighten all those who hear her songs. She is firm in the conviction that her melodic musings should challenge preconceived notions and conventional thinking. Patrick’s songs deal with issues that are often personal – sometimes painfully so – as well as broader issues that are socially significant and relevant.

Like many socially conscious, aspiring female artists, the powerful energy and searingly compelling writing of musician Ani DiFranco hit Patrick with thunderous resonance in her late teens.

Patrick explains, “Ani DiFranco showed me that I could be bold. She showed me how to convey the agony of love. She liberated me. She pointed out the monsters in suits and the poetry of gum on the bottom of my shoe. She took my hand and showed me the real world.”

Patrick’s creative energies have been used to expose the follies and fallacies of modern cultural norms, specifically the pressures of rigid conformity that bombard young people – especially girls and young women. Her early work, “The Girl Rant,” was a piece of beat poetry set to music and examined how the media and pop culture affect the lives of girls.

“And that subject is still a source of inspiration for me, because things haven’t changed in the world. The media still rigidly defines for people what beauty means. The sexual vulnerability of young teenagers is stripped away before they even have a chance to know what it was that they had,” she said.

Operation Empowerment took “The Girl Rant” to numerous high schools, bringing these issues into greater focus. The message was so powerful it caught the attention of the Oprah Winfrey Show and led to a performance at the Media Literacy Conference in Detroit. “The Girl Rant” was featured on Patrick’s first album “House of Ink” (2007).

Taking her spoken-word performance on the road in 2008 opened many doors, including the opportunity to work with world-renowned Shane Koyczan. Patrick toured and collaborated with Koyczan in 2009. Energized by her experiences on the road, Patrick wrote and recorded her second album, “See it Coming” in 2011. After mastering the record with producer Rick Salt, Patrick was convinced to immediately record another album with him. The result was “The Other Side” (2012), featuring performances by music veterans Pat Steward and Doug Elliot. This album went on to critical success, college radio charting in Canada, and was nominated for a Vancouver Island Music Award (Songwriter of the Year). In a bold move, Patrick toured “The Other Side” down the west coast of the USA. The resulting video blogs documented Patrick’s emergence from the safety of the island into the bigger world. The experience had a profound affect on Patrick and led to an explosion of creativity and songwriting.

Patrick teamed up with local artists to perform her songs under “Kendall Patrick and the Headless Bettys”. The band was invited to perform at Indie Week in Toronto, landing her a publicist (Hype Music). This in turn led to a flurry of media activity including appearances on national television (CTV) and newspaper and magazine articles. From 2012-2016, Patrick continued to perform with the Headless Bettys.

Already known throughout the British Columbia music scene for her powerfully intimate, unabashedly authentic and incredibly memorable recordings and performances, Patrick decided she needed to push herself as a songwriter – to both dig deeper and move outside of her comfortable self-contained creative cocoon. She also decided to re-establish herself as a solo artist.

The result of this artistic ‘stretching’ exercise, one that saw her work with co-writers for the first time, is an album of uncompromising lyrical depth and growing musical sophistication. Fittingly, the release is entitled “Peaks and Valleys” (to be released March 3rd, 2017), and is emblematic of the difficult but rewarding journey that Patrick’s new approach took her on.

Find the pre-release for Peaks and Valleys available on iTunes, February 7.