Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon tea break with our Afternoon Tea curators.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Kylie Fox.
Burgeoning New Brunswick-based singer-songwriter Kylie Fox is happy to be sharing her second studio full-length, Sequoia, that was made with the support of ArtsNB, Music New Brunswick and Canada Council for the Arts. Sequoia has come to life as an 11-track album, developed with her band and six-time ECMA-winning producer, Daniel Ledwell (Jenn Grant, Fortunate Ones, The Good Lovelies).
Sequoia is deeply rooted in folk-Canadiana elements that have characterized Fox‘s career, while also exploring folk-rock and jazz-pop fusion. The album could be described as 70s-Sesame Street-meets-Sharon-Van Etten. “The 11 songs that make up Sequoia are reflections on gratitude in relation to the women in my life, my environment, my relationships, and myself,” says Fox. The title Sequoia refers to the source of inspiration for the project which struck upon a news story that told of firefighters working throughout the night to prevent a Sequoia tree from burning in a forest fire. “It resonated with me how severely nature and time have been taken for granted,” concludes Fox. Like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” the collection of songs on Sequoia acknowledge moments when something was taken for granted, while also functioning as pieces of gratitude in and of themselves in how they uplift and celebrate love and life.
The record’s title track features an epic, circus chaos climax at the end, that feels like a life montage. In the song, Fox draws comparisons to how nature is neglected to how she sometimes takes the most important people in her life for granted – something that is pretty honest and can be scary to say out loud.
Stream + share Sequoia in full:
Song: “Stealing Time” by Jessica Rhaye, Sandy Mackay and Bill Preeper (Out Oct. 25th)
Painting: “Colourful Abstract Painting” by Jenn Grant
I decided to choose pieces from two of my favorite East Coast Canadian artists, a brand new song from Jessica Rhaye, Sandy Mackay and Bill Preeper called “Stealing Time” and a new painting available by Jenn Grant, simply called “Colourful Abstract Painting”. As I sip on my bright orange apple cinnamon tea, on an overcast October afternoon, I am noticing how wistfully well these three things work in tandem, capturing the autumnal transformation from season to season, life to death, youth to adulthood.
The tea reminds me of my childhood, pies baked by my mom, apple picking and chasing after the dog, but in truth I bought this tea for the turmeric, with a very adult-intention of drinking something anti-inflammatory for my knee pain. The song is a plea for time to slow down, an angry stance against an unfair theft, using words like “river”, “ferry ride”, “racing”, the heaviness of “nothing can hold back the ice, not even time” met with the carefree yearning to “Spin like a kid with a new set of wings”, bringing to mind the same carousel-of -time sentiment as Joni Mitchell’s song “Circle Game”. With a lens of nostalgia, the painting looks like a life cycle, beginning on the left with wider sections of yellow and pink, which moves into a busier, more chaotic and warmer toned middle section, to finally dipping like a tree trunk to the bottom of the canvas in the darkest, earthiest colors used in the piece. More simply observed, the apple-spice tea, matched with a song about time with a guitar tone evocative of an old-timey banjo, and a painting that could be a pile of loosely raked leaves, feels like an idyllic way to spend ten minutes, contemplating the Fall season and where I sit presently in the mosaic of my life.
Tea + Me 