Folk Artist Keeley Boyle Shares New Single 'Inviting' Ahead of Upcoming EP

If winter is said to be the season of sorrow, then Alaskan songwriter Keeley Boyle understands her sorrow with an intimacy that is in some ways unparalleled. Boyle penned her first solo EP, Inviting, during the coldest, darkest months of the year in her hometown of Kenai, Alaska, a town with a population of only 7500 people.

It is there in the depths of winter that Boyle was able to dislodge an almost decade-long spell of writer's block, creating a glistening meditation on mental health, relationships, and the singular landscape that shapes her being. 

“I made this record when I was learning how to appreciate winter up here. I think I really bonded with it, sort of out of necessity because I was very sad.” For Keeley Boyle, it is no accident that her homecoming to Kenai brought forth a long-awaited era of creativity.

After spending her childhood and adolescence playing music in Alaska, Boyle lived for several years in Portland, OR and then in Nashville, TN, surrounded by the vibrancy of each city's music scene but struggling to write herself. It was only after returning to Kenai that she experienced the revival of her songwriter's voice. In the frozen landscape, something was coming alive.

“I don't think the songs would be the same if I had written them anywhere else.” Boyle says. “As a family we spent a lot of time outside by the ocean and river, watching ice drift or belugas come in with the tide. I feel like the environment here found its way into every song.”

In the EP's single and namesake, Inviting, Boyle breaks the spell of seasonal affective disorder, unravelling herself with a tumbling grace akin to that of the great melting of the Alaskan spring. As the song opens, the guitars are percussive and sparse like the dripping of the first ice melt, soon to give way to a flood of sound and feeling: “I want to soften and change / Into a body that's everything / Something inviting,” she sings over the rush of guitars and harmonies, the hope of warmer weather dissolving the heaviest of sadness.

“While in the thick of a depressive episode I found it thrilling and comforting to watch the transformation,” Boyle says. “Remembering that the way I felt could change soon, too.” 

Inviting was recorded mostly at Boyle's home in Kenai as well as in Anchorage, and was engineered by her husband Nelson Kempf, who also played electric guitar on the record. Boyle brought in Carmen Rothwell and Abbey Blackwell (Alvvays) on bass, Machado Mijiga on drums, and Joseph Shabason (War on Drugs) on saxophone.

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