Jimmie Kilpatrick

Jimmie Kilpatrick is a musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Brandon, Manitoba. He’s been touring regularly and releasing records on Toronto’s You’ve Changed Records since 2009. Kilpatrick cut his rock ‘n’ roll teeth in the early 2000’s, playing alongside Fred Squire, Julie Doiron, Paul Henderson and Jesse Baird in seminal east coast indie outfit Shotgun and Jaybird. He has appeared on recordings by John K. Samson, Christine Fellows, Joel Plaskett and By Divine Right. His 2011 release Transistor

Sisterwas long-listed for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize. Kilpatrick holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Brandon University and is currently a Master of Fine Arts Candidate at the University of Manitoba. In 2018, he was the Manitoba Winner of the BMO 1stART! Competition and presented his performance/installation Quality Control at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto.

About Love songs to End Colonization

I think of these recordings as echoes of past events - echoes which morph and take on new meaning as they reflect and resonate over time.

Our process began with Peter sharing stories about his original performances of these songs. He sent me recordings of himself singing and playing his drum, and with his permission I loaded them into a drum sampler. These samples became the rhythmic foundation for the album, upon which I built and recorded the instrumental arrangements. Peter then recorded vocals at a studio karaoke party hosted by José Contreras: musician, engineer, producer and my dearest friend.

Add your voice - please sing along with everything you’ve got!

- Jimmie Kilpatrick 2022

A message from Tania Willard

These songs are meant to touch your heart in joy, in sorrow, and in combination of both. These songs are meant to create heart networks that resonate deeply with Morin’s base tone as its reverberating

under the surface to be felt as waves of resonance through the body. To experience these works fully, you need to imagine loud laughs, the church of karaoke sacrament, Indigenous heart, and a depth of sound that is now and is from before. This brother, he is a brother to many, contains heaps of laughing hearts that link together like cell phones creating networks of joy, the kind of joy that comes from also knowing the void where joy should be. This heart network can share – it’s like air drop- our hive mind, our embodied thinking, that creeps out beyond our own minds finding others and making friends. I think this includes crow minds and tree minds and swimmer minds and more flyer minds. This jam can reach out to you and plug you in if you want it to, or you can experience it just for you as a big ol heart laugh or as a note resonating sound vibrations and rippling through the vast relational nets we cast. You have heard crows right, how they encourage each other; I think they lift each other up, into a loudness that is crow joy, it makes you a temporary crow just so you can borrow that laugh inside you and it can spend a moment fixing any leaky parts. Then that joy is pushed out in a diaphragm spasm of air returning on wings to the other crows. After this laughter and these crow enunciations have worked through you, they suggest that you share in the beauty of being loud together, listening, mimicking, creating anew. Shiny sounds, loud sounds, leftover sounds discarded are happy to be received; sounds that score, sounds that are scored, and those that are unscored become black wings that gather together, making and unmaking vibrations of voice into what has become the night sky of their wings. Constellations of joy that are sparkling as songs; maybe this brother will sing them, maybe that mother or this sister or hola even that cuzzin, it’s going to be good. You need to listen with your sky, listen with your networked heart, and post to your ancestors about their future grandchildren. You might think this all sounds grand, but grandness is in every moment especially raucous moments of belting out karaoke calls, dialing in disparate moments, minds, hearts and time/zones, to remember that joke, that song, that time...to all the times to come.

Listen through sky

Listen through land

Listen to the water

Listen through bone

Listen through muscle

Listen through laughter

Listen through heart

Sing along together, our circle grows when we sing together.

Sing with the sky

Sing with the land

Sing to the water

Sing in your dreams

Sing along with laughing hearts…oh boy and also love song songs, ha!

Tania Willard, Secwepemc Nation, works within the shifting ideas of contemporary and traditional as it relates to cultural arts and production. As assistant professor in Creative Studies at UBCO (Kelowna BC) currently her research focuses on Secwepemc aesthetics/language/land and interrelated Indigenous art practices. Willard’s projects include BUSH gallery, a conceptual space for land based art and action led by Indigenous artists.

A message from Kevin Ei-ichi DeForest

Thursday nights at the Decker. That was where the real magic first happened for Peter and I. Where we became karaoke regulars in a sketchy bar on the main drag of the abandoned downtown in small town southwestern Manitoba. Living in rural redneck country as a person of colour needs a point of release from the everyday weight of systemic racism. The karaoke moment can be the potential site of a sea change of resistance. Singing together as an intimate place to share love, hurt and laughter as much as

collectively acknowledging the power of song. If you are lucky enough to have a pop song redefine your life’s priorities, coalesce your identity and help you figure out who you are then you know what I mean. Whether that might come from David Bowie defending the right to be whoever you want to be in “Changes”. Or Beyonce rallying African American women’s collective strength through her inspiration as powerful role model in “Formation”. #churchofkaraoke

Peter Morin understands all too well this empowering principle of song. The album you have in your hands is here to protect you, to provide resistance from colonization through your singing body. As opposed to it being a covers record, it is instead a performance artifact. These recordings faithfully capture karaoke renditions of Peter’s pop song faves. They are here for you to soak in his performance as well as to collaborate and sing along with him. You also have the instrumental tracks on their own, in classic hip-hop fashion, for you to remix with your own Acapella version or bestie group chant. Just make sure there’s a turntable at your next kitchen party.

A great pop song has to have remarkable emotional relatability. As if the lyrics somehow read like the messy confessions in your private journals. There is a palpable connection in experiencing a song that goes beyond its words. That familiar melancholic lilt in the vocal melody, or the sturdy, memorable arrangement of the music can work in powerful and empowering ways. That listening experience can somehow bring complicated emotional situations of heartbreak, love and loss profoundly to the surface. Sharing that aural vulnerability also has the ability to provide resistance and resilience.

Paying tribute to the original recorded version by singing from your own space aligns that emotional energy into your personal experience. By repurposed these pop songs of heartbreak, love and loss against colonial aggression, your engagement with these songs can be like medicine. It can build immunity and provide strength against colonization. As a portable performance artwork, please enjoy this very live capturing of Peter’s karaoke performance. Sing with this record, in unity, from the heart and the guts, to complete the performance cycle. Then put that needle back on again.

I’d like to dedicate this writing to my karaoke spirit animal Hanako, a sweet Jack Russell Terrier who helped me see the simple importance of loving as the glue holding the whole network of friends and community together). I sing also for you, always.

Kevin Ei-ichi DeForest is a visual, multimedia artist, and Karaoke singer. He was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Japanese and Swiss parents. Kevin is an Associate Professor IshKaabatens Waasa Gaa Inaabateg Department of Visual Art at Brandon University.