Songwriter’s followup album two decades in the making

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This article was published 26/03/2025 (212 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After Rachel Kane gave birth to her son, Adam Fainman, she couldn’t have known she was cradling her future album producer.

But perhaps she should have guessed, because from the start motherhood had a way of unlocking the songwriter she’d forgotten lived inside.

“I was sitting there nursing Adam and I looked out the window, and what I saw looked to me like one of those (plush) stuffed birds my mother used to put up in our apartment above or beside the stove,” Kane says, revisiting an address in Toronto she remembers well despite the newborn fog.

“Who put that stuffed bird there? I was tired, so my mind played a trick on me. All of a sudden, it flew away.”

After putting her son down to rest, the New York-born Kane — whose first performances came at the corner of Eighth and Broadway as the outlier of a band of Spanish Harlem Puerto Rican buskers — picked up her guitar and wrote a song called Little Bird.

More than 30 years later, at the dawn of the COVID era, the son once again took on the mantle of creative catalyst.

Fainman, an accomplished beatboxer who performs as Beatox, remembered his mother as a quiet folk hero, finger-picking in a sunbeam and humming words yet to come. In 1998, when the schedule of motherhood and teaching French allowed, Kane released her debut album, Groundwire, followed in 2001 by All in a Dream.

“In a world where Emmylou Harris and Lucinda Williams hold court with the critics, (Kane) deserves recognition for her soft-spoken and well-thought out approach to her elfin voice, one that marries John Prine to Marianne Faithful,” wrote Exclaim!.

The stage-shy Kane mostly receded from the public ear, fighting her way through a dark period in a struggle with substance addiction. Fainman, who runs the music-video generation platform Moonlite, figured a musical olive branch could be key to staying afloat as the world shut down.

He knew that in her 30s, after the birth of his sister Adrienne, his mother received grants to support her songwriting from Factor and the Canada Council for the Arts.

“He said, ‘It’s time to try again,’” recalls Kane.

So when COVID came, and with his grandmother’s house empty, Fainman invited his mother over to record a demo of a song — Weather the Storm — that would become the fourth track on Kane’s first album in nearly 25 years, Holler at the Wind, funded with help from the Canada council.

Set for release on Friday, the 11-song album finds the songwriter grappling with biblical circumstances such as environmental catastrophe, the loss of her father and the pain of personal vices paired with an emptier nest.

An album that justifies the term “long-awaited release,” Holler at the Wind is a cross-generational promise to not just break deeply entrenched cycles, but to lovingly tend to the garden of roots music invention.

While Exclaim’s comparisons from 2001 stand, on her new album, Kane flies in similar directions to Canadian folk singers including Abigail Lapell, Arielle Soucy and Rose Cousins, the Nova Scotian Juno-winner who brings her latest album, Conditions of Love, to the WECC April 5.

In crafting the songs on the record, Kane let her son in on the challenges she had traversed, opening the door for therapeutic sharing and for the artist to view her son, who has released three full-length albums as Beatox since 2020, as an equal partner in the conversation.

“At first, it was hard to treat him just as a producer. I know I stepped on his toes, and it’s a good thing he’s such a good dancer to get out of the way. It made me listen better to him because I have a bad habit of talking over people, in particular, my kids, because at some level, I see them as extensions of myself, but they are not. They are their own people, and I have to try to remember to not talk less, but listen more. That was the overall thing I learned from this project, so I’m a better person for it. I think I’d like to think, anyway,” Kane says.

Working on the project — recorded at Winnipeg’s Paintbox Studios with multi-instrumentalists Michael Jerome Browne, David Woodhead and Sean Burke — was for both Fainman and Kane an opportunity to gain appreciation for the other’s artistic voice while also trading memories as springboards for lyrical ideas.

On Pace Yourself, a plucky song about self-control and boundary setting, Kane finds comparison between her adult self at her lowest points and her children at their most impressionable. “When you’re little, running feels like freedom, but a lot can go wrong if you can’t slow down. You could swim too far, too fast, get caught in a riptide, or end up in an alley with something bad going down.”

Fainman and Kane both credit the album as a life-saver, an act of nourishment and mutual self-preservation that serves as a testament to self-honesty and the adaptive conditions of love.

Just as when her children could rest in the crook of her elbow, Kane has once again become invigorated as a songwriter, writing and playing with greater consistency and structure.

“It feels great to go back to that well,” says Kane. “It’s such a magical thing. You don’t even know half the time where the songs are coming from. If you just sit down and let yourself be, they come out, you know?”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com