Kenna Burima's new songs navigate depression, motherhood and rebirth

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From 2019 into 2020, singer-songwriter Kenna Burima had a set ritual.

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She would sit in front of her grand piano and wait. It was always at night and always after her then two-year-old daughter, Ellianna, had been put to bed. Writing music in the past had usually been an arduous, painstaking process for the musician. But for these compositions, she would just wait for the songs to come to her. Eventually, as she explains in the introduction of her newest project, a door would open.

Burima was suffering from both sleep deprivation and depression at the time. She had filled her journals with detailed notes about what she was going through. It was a cathartic experience for the Calgary musician that would eventually lead to the nine tracks on her upcoming album, While She Sleeps.

“I wrote myself out of a hole,” says Burima, in an interview from her Calgary home. “I started writing in the morning. I started writing at night. Then I would sit down at the piano and, through a really, really slow process, start to marry the words I would list in my journal to the music that would come to me sitting at the piano. It’s just me and just the piano. No bandmates. No multi-tracks. No layering of anything. It’s just two tracks. So there was no hiding. Going through that dark time, when I came out from the other end of it I just couldn’t hide anymore. I’ve always been shitty with small talk, but now I’m really bad at small talk and just really willing to talk about my inner landscape or just talk about feelings and to listen and question where other people are at.”

There is certainly something deeply personal and elemental to the tracks on While She Sleeps: from the haunting and minimalist album-opening instrumental The Golden Thread to the beautifully sung, soul-searching torch song Pondering and the expressive Tea with Satie, a gentle ode to the early 20th-century French avant-garde composer Erik Satie.

Listeners will have to wait until the spring to hear the album. But Burima will be offering a sneak peak of the material on Saturday, Jan. 28 when she transforms the Engineered Air Theatre at Arts Commons into a 19th-century New York City piano bar to play the song cycle as part of the High Performance Rodeo. On the same day, Burima will be releasing While She Sleeps as a songbook, which will offer sheet music for all the songs alongside detailed notes of how they came to be.

The idea is for musicians of various skill levels to play the songs themselves. Burima isn’t the first artist to release music along these lines. In 2012, Beck released Song Reader as a book of sheet music of songs he had only played live. It eventually was released as an album made up of the same songs interpreted by various artists such as Norah Jones, actor-comedian Jack Black and R&B cult favourite Swamp Dogg.

Burima hopes to do something similar with While She Sleeps and has put out a call to her fellow Calgary musicians, inviting them to offer interpretations that she will release on social media. Given the deeply personal nature of the lyrics, these songs may seem unlikely candidates for multiple interpretations. But Burima said she found the opposite to be true. Being raw and vulnerable and “completely truthful” to her own experiences in her writing seems to have made the song more universal.

“People, audiences, other musicians, other artists pick up on it and understand it in a different way than my other albums and songs, where I am trying to tell other people’s stories. I sometimes tried to tell my own stories but through the lens of ‘I hope people will like me. I hope they’ll like this song,'” she says. “There has always been a mask: It was Kenna Burima the songwriter; Kenna Burima the performer.”

A classically trained musician who studied at both Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary, Burima is a composer and teacher who has released two solo albums and played with a variety of acts over the years, including indie-folksters Woodpigeon and punky garage rockers LoveWaves.

It’s hardly surprising that her life changed drastically after the birth of her daughter five years ago.

Burima says she had always embraced the life of a musician completely – “I loved performing, loved touring, loved partying – the whole experience of being a performing artist” – but also recognizes that she likely suffered from depression for most of her life.

“I chased it away or exaggerated it with drugs and alcohol,” she says. “I think it’s a pretty common coping mechanism. The stage is a glorious place to be but it is also a place where excessive behaviour and excessive habits are born and nurtured. The music industry, full-stop, is a place where behaviours and coping mechanisms involving drugs and alcohol can be hidden in plain sight. Once I became pregnant and once I had my daughter, I wasn’t on stage. I wasn’t in the place I so desperately loved because I was caring for a small human that needed me 24/7. Also, I couldn’t utilize the same coping mechanisms. So, as I’ve heard from many parenting friends, you have a kid and everything cracks open in terms of not being able to rely on the same ways to cope.”

Burima doesn’t shy away from outlining this transformation in the songs, which she began writing as she was suffering from a depression that was likely exacerbated by sleep deprivation and, later,  the pandemic. While the compositions are still well-crafted, Burima said her technique changed. Rather than fussing with or questioning her initial instincts, she allowed them to flow free.

“The music and melodies started coming to me – coming to my mind and coming out of my fingers,” she says. “It was a completely different process. It was much slower, much gentler and it took a lot of faith because it would just be pieces. Instead of sitting down and writing the song from beginning to end, which is how I would try to write before, it would just be a phrase or a bit of a melody or even just a couple of notes. Then I would craft it.”

While the songs have a melancholy feel and may reflect a dark period in her life, the story seems to have a happy ending.

“I’m happy to talk about any and all aspects of my mental health and my experiences writing this album: that journey of working through postpartum depression and navigating the pandemic simultaneously and then using my trade and practise as an avenue to unpack it all and understand myself more and ultimately become the parent, the mother, that I knew I was capable of,” she says.

“It was all happening simultaneously. Possibly I chose it. I was either going to white-knuckle it, which I was for a couple of years, or choose to think maybe there is this other way. So I don’t drink. I’m boring in that regard. Some of my friends say ‘Kenna, you don’t do any of the things you used to do.’ I don’t. But I still love to dance with abandon, I love partying, I love being out late, I love howling at the moon. I love doing all the things I did before but I do them differently and, generally, I’m able to wake up at the ungodly hour that my daughter is adamant to wake up at.”

While She Sleeps will be performed Jan. 28 at 7:30 p.m at the Engineered Air Theatre as part of the High Performance Rodeo. The While She Sleeps Songbook will be released on Jan. 28. The album will come out in the spring.