Interview: kerri tells us how to "Use your wings" and rise from adversity with his new album.
- Apr 28
- 10 min read
Use your wings is an album from the alternative, Montreal-based artist, kerri, that dives into the scary reality of life, falling apart, and piecing things together to build yourself back up. For this release, magSCENE had the honor of getting to know kerri and chat about the album’s creation.
magSCENE: When listening to Use your wings, I heard a lot of different influences/genres that melted together. How would you define the sound or genre for this album?
kerri: I’m heading more acoustic as I get older, kind of. I feel like when I started, when I was much younger… I was really into doing as much as possible. As I get older and mature, I really like the simplicity of writing around the guitar, instead of a whole ass beat… The whole name of the game for that tape was to keep things as simple as possible, and a lot of the takes were the demo takes. Like, I didn’t even record after the demo takes, because I felt like it was cool… So yeah, it’s indie in a way, but I was trying to approach it in that way - like DIY. So I guess indie, but with my sauce on it - like space, reverb, awareness of atmosphere, and everything like that.
Beginning with a soft alarm clock, we wake up to an upbeat drum pattern accompanied by a bouncy guitar loop. Navigation is our entrance to kerri’s mind, as he clarifies that what we are about to hear are excerpts from “his diary.” Mid-song we take a pause to hear a voice memo that states “no matter how much you love someone, sometimes there’s other things to consider,” hinting towards love’s impact on the situation kerri is trying to break free from. Smoothly transitioning into the next track, Legos, we witness a gentle side of kerri as he reflects on the man he has become. Partway through the track, a sonic progression occurs with a larger drum pattern presence that plays in tangent with the line “I knew I had to be the strongest version of me.”
magSCENE: Did you have any other inspirations that were behind it [the album]? Like other artists, songs, even visual media or other types of media?
kerri: It’s kind of like a lot of my heroes. Honestly, I was trying to really channel a lot of the ways that people I really respect make music. So I would say James Blake, Frank Ocean, or King Krule… people kind of like that. Where it’s sort of the decisions that their making and when their making them, and it lays out a story for you. A lot of the choices I made were influenced by those sorts of people, like Mac DeMarco I would say as well.
The track Copacetic features a voicemail memo to kerri expressing love and wishing them a good night at work, as it leads into the following track Use your wings. In this song, kerri reminisces on a past lover’s touch whilst pondering on existential thoughts that keep him up at night. Wishing for the other person to mean it when saying the words “I love you” in his moment of need, kerri expands on the metaphor of using their wings to keep him up. At the end of the song, we experience a sonic spiral - an aural lifting off the ground, followed by a soft crowd cheering. Reaching the midpoint of the album with I became you, the track offers a more ambient sound design that plays off of the beat and has a richer warmth in timbre, as kerri settles into himself. As we exit the song, we hear another voice memo from the same woman discussing how we can’t change others. It is ultimately up to them to make the decision to help themselves.
magSCENE: I noticed listening through there were voice memos or voice recordings that you placed throughout the project. I wanted to ask what those are and why you chose to include them - specifically in those places or songs?
kerri: A lot of them are from my mom, haha. I think most or all of them are my mom, with some minor ones in between… it was literally, just chronologically, my mom comforting me while I was going through a bad time for like 6-8 months… things were falling apart, like getting super fucked up. Just pieces of my mom’s advice to me, and a lot of it boils down to keeping it simple, and keeping life simple. It kind of just felt right to me, and I’d try to place them where it was talking about what the song was about or maybe what the next thing was about. It’s just kind of like the mini interludes… For me, hearing my own mom telling me advice in the middle of the song hit like crazy.
magSCENE: For Here for you, the intro was Max Fry.
kerri: Yeah, it’s a sample of Max Fry shouting me out in London.
magSCENE: What made you want to use that?
kerri: Max is one of my longest best-music-friends. I was in a place where that meant a lot to me, and he was on tour and sending me clips of him playing our collab… It was like the middle of winter in Canada… It's literally the worst thing on Earth and everyone is so depressed for 6-7 months. It’s pitch-black dark at 4PM every day. It’s cold as fuck. I was working at a restaurant. I was a fry cook at that time, and I was smoking cigarettes. I was looking at my friend… Max is sending me clips of people in London singing our collab. He was sending them as the tour was going… It made me feel like I was worth a shit. It was really reassuring… I just ripped it and put it in the song, and it’s the going hard type of song.
Kicking & screaming is a heavily nostalgic track that features vocals from Fraud Perry. A dreamy amalgamation of acoustic and electric guitars forms a cloud of romanticization over the scenario lyrically at hand. Outgrowing old habits can be hard, especially when “that’s just what you know.” Using a voice memo of kerri’s mom stating that “you can’t just ignore” what is going on in hopes of the situation potentially changing for the better, we transition into a remix of Kicking & screaming, titled Benny’s verse.
magSCENE: I noticed with Kicking & screaming, you have the one you dropped so far… and then you have the one with Bennett Sobel on it. What was the decision behind having that verse?
kerri: So like the Kicking & screaming? And then like the remix of Kicking & screaming?
magSCENE: Okay, so it’s a remix?
kerri: Well it… I don’t care what people call it really. To me it’s just like… One day I was taking the acapella and was like, “This is such a good hook.” I want to run this shit back and do some other shit. I made the beat and I was like, “What if there’s a thing?” A lot of music I like will do daring stuff… I don’t know, it’s just a cool experience to see. I called Bennett immediately and was like, “You need to come to my house right now and do a verse right now.” He was like, “Okay,”... He’s like a big part of Kicking & screaming as well. He played a lot of instruments, as well as a lot of instruments on the whole project… I didn’t tell him what it was and he just did it… It’s a cool moment.
Here for you begins with the sample of longtime friend, Max Fry, saying “let’s do it for kerri” prior to playing their collab at his live show in London. The project takes a bit of a turn as Here for you takes on a more indie rock sound - incorporating more electric guitar presence and a solo in the outro. As we exit the track, another voice memo is played, discussing the fear of being judged with sounds of a child coming through.
magSCENE: When you’re conceptualizing your album - this one or other ones from before - what’s that creation process like?
kerri: It’s really long… Tons and tons of tinkering and tweaking and minute details that add up to a bigger picture. Um… I kind of don’t plan, really. I just do and follow like one tiny step at a time for a year and a bit… It’s just more about feelings and I don’t try to plan anymore. I’m just chasing like stabbing myself in the heart that makes me know it’s crazy.
magSCENE: Between your last project you dropped and then this project, what were things you learned along the way? Whether it was music-related or not.
kerri: I mean there’s a lot. Like save money is probably one… Honestly, there’s so much that I don’t even know. Like SO MUCH. Dude, I feel like this project was literally my whole way of life at some point was crumbling and I didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know the person that I could become. I was kind of just restarting an adult life at 26… processing this shit through these songs. I think like I said earlier - the name of the game is to simplify everything and you can be more at peace - so I feel like the way this music is structured and how my music from here is going to be structured shows a lot about how I view things. I used to want to be doing a ton at once and I’d have a fucking ton of songs and this whole thing… I kind of find more power in the minimalism of it, I guess, or just being more efficient and having less fat on the bones. Yeah, that kind of thing.
Continuing with the sound of a child speaking, Freq show begins. A song titled after kerri’s experience with panic attacks for multiple months after being dropped from a label. He began to “realize things were changing,” and was heavily hit with feelings of isolation as he saw himself as an “internet musician in a city of local community musicians.” With “many sounds jumping around” in the track and the sentiment of how “music’s a freak show,” kerri stuck with the double entendre title, further emphasizing a song that continues the change taken with Here for you. Less nostalgia is present in this track - we are grounded with him as Freq show displays an emotionally raw and matured sound. Ending the song with a voice memo from his mom, we hear a moment of reassurance as she talks about “playing his music around” when he’s not there.
magSCENE: Off of this project, which song was your favorite to create?
kerri: Oh my god, that’s a super tough question… I’m gonna bring up the list right now, because I need to see a list of this before I answer this question. It’s a hard fucking question. I don’t know, it’s all this big fugue state that I was in, where I didn’t know what was happening, I was just coping, until it’s done. And I like them for different reasons… the one I liked making the most is probably Navigation because it’s the first song. It was the most random, unintentional thing I ever did. Like I was sitting alone - not even in my own house - and grabbed this guitar, that’s like not even my guitar, and put my phone on and started playing it… I was like, “This is gas. Okay cool, I’m gonna do it on the phone right now.” Just whipped up a beat randomly and wrote over it from journal pages I’d written… I think it was just like that, because I felt free about it. So probably that. And it was one sitting and I was done. The rest was kind of not as much like that. There were months of tinkering and adjusting all of the stuff on certain things.
magSCENE: Was there a song on the project that had an interesting creation process to it? Like it was different from usual for you? Or that felt different to you when making it?
kerri: Mostly, I feel like I was refining myself a lot actually… I did a lot of years of exploring everything and trying different sounds and making a lot of songs on a project. Doing tons of experimenting. I feel like here I was starting to really hone in on what I’m best at and do a lot of that in a succinct way. It’s a hard question to answer also. I would say maybe… I think on I became you, on the fifth song, I think that was a cool time making a choir of so many people, you can’t tell how many people it is. I had fun doing that… the whole song starts from like 10 people singing this line that I wrote. That was a cool thing to work with and to make it feel how I wanted it to feel.
The final track of the project, Ego, is the most emotionally broken and stripped back song on Use your wings. Minimal production that features a guitar riff played by friend, Ezra Martin, we get to hear a breathtaking display of vocals that kerri describes as him “losing [his] shit on the beat.” Lyrically, kerri’s spiraling world is shared with us as he delves into his insecurities.
magSCENE: Skinny Atlas mentioned how he worked a lot with you on the project - the engineering and stuff. Something he said he observed was that… “you’re cohesively intentional and quick to create great things.” What he wanted to know was where do you draw your inspiration to be so consistently conceptual?
kerri: Yeah that’s true. I mean it’s kind of like… it comes down to like a coping mechanism. It’s kind of that simple… music is by far the best coping mechanism that I’ve ever found in my life. People talk about “ten-thousand hours,” but I feel like it’s been like 15 years… every fucking day coming home and just pouring my shit into this. It’s consistently making cooler results, so I’m just gonna keep doing it forever probably. The conceptual thing is like - I just want it to make sense… I want to paint a picture. The art that I like always paints a picture, so I want to do the same thing.
Use your wings is a testament to finding your way back from rock bottom, and shows us the never-ending creative prowess that kerri has developed over the years. To be able to “gut punch yourself” and then “step away from it afterwards and be a normal person” is a proven coping mechanism that can deliver some of the best work - some of the best art.
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