Biography

“Even though that year and a half was the most quiet of my life, professionally, I feel as though it was my most fruitful creatively, and as a multi-faceted woman,” recalls celebrated singer-songwriter Kyle Carey.

What she is referring to is her first year and a half in her hand built tiny-home-on wheels with her one year old and husband in the Vermont hills. The pandemic, a journey through infertility and its resulting treatments and finally–the welcoming of her son Asher, found the transatlantic artist finally at home.

“The days were just so incomparably sweet” she says with a wistful smile. “We had spent five years building our home, two years trying to conceive and here we were, finally living a life that aligned with our values”.

That life consisted of rising early in the morning to heed her infant’s cries, tying him to her chest and spending much of the day wandering the wooded trails outside their home. Carey learned how to forage mushrooms and fiddleheads (knowledge she hopes to pass on to her son), made crisp from an apple tree that grew outside their door and at dusk-time in June, saw the field outside their window become a carnival of fireflies.

“There was something so precious, so holy about that time, I was reticent to share it” she confesses, but the time for sharing would have to come. Shortly before moving into their tiny home, Kyle had raised nearly $40,000 dollars on Kickstarter to fund her fourth full-length album.

“I was completely gobsmacked I was able to do it,” she admits. “I was literally spooning breakfast into my son’s mouth on the last day of the campaign when one fan alone sent almost $7,000. And even though I was allowing myself to savor the early days of my Asher’s arrival, I also felt a deep sense of commitment to honor the incredible generosity my listeners had shown me.”

And honor it she did. In the winter of 2024 Carey traveled to Nashville to record ‘The Last Bough’ at Peach Tree studios, with multi-instrumentalist Kai Welch at the helm as producer. “Kai is such a profoundly creative person” Carey confides, “I was confident that he could take my music somewhere it has never been before”.

The result is the transcendent and wholly unique ‘The Last Bough’. The two hunkered down in Kai’s studio for a week, accompanied by the insight and talents of veteran guitarist and fellow producer Anthony DaCosta. Bluegrass guitarist Christian Sedelmeyer dropped in to add fiddle parts, Ruth Moody provided ethereal backing vocals, while the rest of the album was rounded out by Jamie Dick on percussion, Sam Howard on upright Bass, Mike McGoldrick on whistle and flute, and Scotland’s James Graham on Gàidhlig backing vocals.

And while each of the songs on ‘The Last Bough’ glows like a gem, some have a luster that radiates from within–the breathtaking title track being one such example. “The whole concept behind the title track began with the image of a family tree in a Bible. At the time I wasn’t sure I would be able to have a child, and that image, along with an empty final line became really emblematic and profound for me.”

And while fate (and a little bit of elbow grease) finally did make Carey a mother, more than just Asher proved to be a family affair. “My husband Carmine joined me in the studio when I recorded ‘Via Del Campo’. I wanted to make sure I was getting the Italian pronunciation right, and he was so patient and helpful while we worked through it. Italy has become a second home for me, and I’m so grateful that Asher has that as the other half of his heritage.”

Carey also didn’t shy away from the dark and controversial, plumbing the depths of the postpartum experience to even write a song’–The Sere Wind’ told from the perspective of an Irish woman, deep in the throes of postpartum depression, who tragically drowns her newborn after thinking the fairies had stolen and swapped it with a ‘changeling’.

Things take on a far sweeter and lighter tone with the personal and poignant    Bà i ù o hò, the first song in Scottish Gàidhlig that Carey learned to sing, fifteen years ago, when she first began her study of the language on the Isle of Skye. She sang it to her son before each of his naps and at bedtime, and even wrote some verses of her own in Gàidhlig to add to the song, inspired by the natural world outside their door, ‘The moon will come for you, with a small star in her hair./ The gentle cuckoo in her nest, keeps her eggs warm./The frog swimming in the stream, sings lullabies for you.’

Upon completion, Kyle asked Kai to weave Asher’s ultrasound heartbeat throughout the song, resulting in an unforgettable duet between mother and child.

Much has been said about Kyle and the unique brand of music she has come to describe as ‘Gaelic Americana’, but no album of hers thus far has been so personal, so intimate and such a striking manifestation of the profound and simple pleasures that are born of hearth and home.

‘Carey’s music isn’t quite rooted in anything traditional as it is an innovation on both genres to patch together something whole and new. It’s clear and quickly uncovered that Carey’s musical fusion is far more than a gimmick – it’s something innate and uniquely hers that offers an intangibly captivating spice to her work.’ Says Popmatters Jonathan Frahm, who named Kyle’s previous album ’The Art of Forgetting’ one of the best albums of 2018.

“I promised to myself that for the first three years of Asher’s life he would be my guiding star and main focus”, Carey confides at the end of our interview. “These early years are something we’ll never get back, and I didn’t’ want to miss a thing. Now that he’s a little older, I’m feeling excited and ready to stretch my wings again and journey forth.”

With an army of loyal and loving fans behind her, a touring history on both sides of the Atlantic, a bucolic home in which to hang her flower crown, and a deep appreciation and interconnection with the rhythm of the seasons and the cycles of the moon–who knows what might unfurl, and what might blossom for Carey next.