Miss Emily - Defined By Love (2022)

Defined By Love is a deeply personal 12-song meditation on deception, pain, resilience, and finding strength among the ruins of heartbreak. Someone once said that we are the sum total of our experiences.

Whether it’s parental love, romantic love, or an all-encompassing love for community; Emily’s contention is that love is at the core of who we are. Emily Fennell’s earliest memories swirl through the dusty fairgrounds of Southern Ontario, accompanied by her parents, as she pursued her love of performing at county fair singing competitions where the creaky floorboards of outdoor stages laid down the backbeat. Later as a young adult, Miss Emily emerged from a soul-drenched gumbo of blues, old-school R&B, and jazz. With Ray Charles and Aretha as her mentors and K.D. Lang as her benchmark she went to school. Studying her craft on the side roads, backroads, and highways of Ontario; she played every juke joint and nightclub that would have her.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Piper, she took up residency at The Merchant in Kingston. Every Friday night she preached love, happiness, and harmony to jam-packed crowds and in the midst of the cover songs, she’d throw in a few of her own. Soon the set lists would be more hers than theirs and as she fell in love with her adopted hometown of Kingston, Kingston fell in love with her. It’s a love that flourished as she played festivals and music halls and more recently six sold-out shows at the Isabel Bader Theatre. Now she’s headlining the City’s centerpiece of artistic performance, “The Grand.” In all that time, despite the advice of highly-placed music industry insiders, never once did Miss Emily assume a persona. She has been hilarious in her honesty, heartfelt in her compassion, or touching in her grief but always and forever she’s been her genuine self on stage and off. That naked commitment to the truth has never been more apparent than in her fourth studio album, Defined By Love. It’s a warts-and-all diary of a year filled with confusion and anger, lost relationships and found humanity.