The story of A New Reality Mind, the fourth studio album from Oakland’s Madeline Kenney, begins with a donkey. It appeared on the cover of 2020’s Sucker’s Lunch, a record that, as she told The FADER’s Alex Robert Ross, was about how “the fool can truly be wise, because they're free of logic. Wise in that they can experience things in a pure, untainted, unfettered sort of way.” But leaving good judgment at the door can be an invitation to heartbreak, as Kenney learned the hard way when she went through a sudden, mid-pandemic break-up.

The songs that make up A New Reality Mind existed in bits and pieces before this (Kenney says it was her subconscious’ way of trying to warn her), but the album as a whole didn’t begin to take shape until after, when a trip to a large animal rescue revealed another side to the proverbial ass. “They’re incredibly wise,” Kenney tells me, “They know good people, and if you are a good person, they will accept you.” Likewise, she’s evolved from the joke to the joker, an artist who can embrace her emotional depth while laughing at herself for being a sappy romantic.

In the music video for lead single “Superficial Conversation,” Kenney embodies this new persona, rocking an oversized golden ruff and painted-on clown makeup. Her comprehensive vision extends to the music itself — on previous releases, Kenney worked with Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, but after a successful test run with the Summer Quarter EP in 2021, she decided to self-produce A New Reality Mind. The sonic palette she dreams up is full of vibrant synthesizers and “first idea, best idea” details, like the snippet of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing docu-series that pops up midway through “I Drew A Line.”

Because she’s involved in every stage of its making and release, Kenney’s work feels intentional and interconnected; that BBC docu-series I mentioned earlier first appeared in a post on her Substack before sneaking its way into one of her songs. During our interview, Kenney speaks candidly about therapy and effusively about Grimes’ Visions, often making these unintelligible noises there’s no easy way to transcribe phonetically. On A New Reality Mind, her creative and personal sides feel closer together than ever before.

The FADER: The big change in this new album of yours, A New Reality Mind, is the fact that it was self-produced. What prompted the decision to be like, "I'm going to work on this solo from a writing and a production standpoint?"

Madeline Kenney: I've always written by myself, but I think I got used to getting the songs to a certain point, and then being like, "Okay, I need somebody else to help me realize them." Honestly, [self-producing] started off circumstantial, with the pandemic and stuff. I was thinking about trying to work with Jenn [Wasner] again, because I love her and love hanging out with her, but she was touring a ton, and I wasn't really available to meet up with her anywhere, and it was proving to be too hard to actually make happen. So that was circumstance one, and circumstance two being budget — just being like, “I really want to see how cheaply I can make a record that I'm still proud of.”

And how would you say that that decision shifted your practical creative process, with respect to previous releases like Sucker's Lunch?

On Sucker's Lunch, the songs really became more refined in the pop and song structure realm, because of Jenn's help. She's such a master songwriter and crafter of a world, and just knows what a song needs. That was super fun, but working on my own allowed me to experiment a little more and just be like, "No, actually, I think I don't want this song to be refined in a certain way. I think I want it to stay weird and end abruptly, or I want it to exist in its own weird little sonic realm, rather than transforming from the demo into something more crisp." A lot of these, they basically are the demo, just with different parts re-recorded over them.

That feeling of spontaneity — of “first idea, best idea” — definitely comes across on a lot of these songs. Were there specific musical influences that you were trying to channel when getting more experimental on the songwriting front, or on the production front?

Maybe not explicitly, but I was listening to a ton of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Jenny Hval.

I can hear the Jenny Hval all over this record.

Hopefully that's okay with her. I really like how her stuff has kind of transformed over time…there are some songs that are definitely still experimental, but they have a part that you can sing along to, and I think that's really cool. I still don't think of myself as anywhere near as brave as her in her songwriting or her experimentation, but I'm always trying to get a little braver.

What do you think it means to write songs bravely?

I feel like there is a level of real, almost terrifying authenticity and honesty that I hope I can achieve, but that I see and I'm inspired by in other artists. David Berman is my other huge inspo…I think about it in terms of plain-speak poetry, words that don't necessarily come across as poppy, and fun, and beautiful to listen to. One of my favorite lines he has is from “Sleeping is the Only Love,” where he goes, "Give a box of candy or a foot massage. Some people don't take the time," and it's so sweet, and also it says the word "foot," which, for most people, doesn’t inspire poetry, right? Or with the [Jenny Hval] song, “Take Care of Yourself,” when she's like, "What is it to take care of yourself? Getting paid, getting laid, getting married, getting pregnant, fighting for visibility in your market, realizing your potential, being healthy, being clean, shaving in all the right places." Normally, the words on their own might not inspire deep feelings of the poetics of life, but in the song, I identify so much with all of those things, and they feel real in a way that is not turning life into a digested version of itself, like something made clean for consumption.

Going through a breakup and then writing an album afterwards, I really didn't want to be like, "This boy made me sad." That's my least favorite, least interesting music to listen to. I wanted to make something that was more about honestly, myself and the decisions that I made, and I always want the music to feel like people can listen to it and be like, "Oh God, I felt that same thing."

I don't feel like I've reached the potential that I want to reach, but the song “The Same Again,” has this line that says, "I cry in the bath and can't quite see in the morning. When I was young, I learned how to fly off the handle without warning." I like that line. I'm proud of it, and that's what I mean when I say I'm trying to get at something that really happens. I did cry in the bath, and I did get up in the morning and I was a little puffy, and I just felt like shit. I wanted to be honest about as much as I could, but I still feel like I could be more honest.

Producing a record in the wake of a breakup, but then also choosing to center the record around that breakup and to make it the central narrative not only within the songs, but within the press — that has to be challenging emotionally.

I had a long talk with my PR guy, and with my label, and with the person writing my bio and everything, and I was like, “Obviously, that's the subject of these songs — a lot of the songs, not all of them — and it's part of the storytelling, and I'm okay with that.” It's important to me to not give that situation too much power in the album or in my life. Obviously, it was really shitty, but "It does not do to dwell," as Albus Dumbledore said. I don't want to give my ex the power of "Oh, I inspired music,” because I’m going to write songs about my life no matter what. It's going to be whatever circumstances I’m in.

I feel like there was a through line with Sucker's Lunch too, because I knew at the beginning that I was getting into something that I probably would get hurt by, and then lo and behold, it happened. That's why there's a donkey on the record, because I set myself up to be the fool, and I became the fool. It was all very self-aware, but I did it anyway.

Let's talk about that fool imagery a bit more, because obviously that was something you were drawing on a lot leading up to Sucker's Lunch. You discussed it in your last interview with Alex, and then it carried through in the video for the lead single from this record, “Superficial Conversation”, with the big ruffled collar and the painted-on makeup.

We shot that video and the cover in the same day, because I knew exactly what I wanted on the cover, and my very good friend made that vision come to life with the dress that she sewed. I wanted to make an elbow joke about the imagery of the fool and the clown, and with the donkey, “making an ass of myself.”

At the same time, the donkey is a little bit more than that. The day after my ex broke up with me — it was very sudden, and I was just a wreck — my best friend flew down, and we both went up to my coworker's farm in Petaluma. She rescues large animals, like donkeys, and horses, and goats, and sheep, and dogs. It's a really magical place.

My friend was just like, "You just need to be around animals, and they will understand what you need.” That's why I wanted to use the donkey image too, because there's that concept of the ass and "hee-haw," but donkeys are very deep feeling, sweet creatures. I'm there, I'm crying, and the donkeys, when you put your hands out, they'll put their head in your hands, and you can hold them. And I was holding this donkey, and it was so healing and so nice, and I just felt like I was going to be okay.

The donkey, to me, is the very complex representation of “You can be all of that.” You can be the idiot, and the fool, and the sucker, but you also can be deep and feeling, and that's okay, and that's why I got into that situation in the first place — because I'm an overly romantic, deep feeling idiot. But I wouldn't really have it any other way.

When you talk about being a person who feels too much and too deeply, do you think that songwriting is more of an outlet for that, or is it more of a byproduct of it?

That's a really good question, and a difficult one to make a distinction of, because I make stuff all the time, whether it's music or other things. I make things out of clay, or I paint, or I garden. I'm just always doing something creative when I have time. Often, I would've answered that as "Oh, it's just something I do anyway, so it doesn't matter."

But it's interesting, because recently I had an experience where I was upset about something that somebody did, and I didn't have anywhere to put my emotions. I was alone in my house, I just didn't know what to do, and I hadn't sat down and written a song from start to finish in years, actually. I usually write in pieces, over several weeks. But yeah, I did the thing where I was like, "I'm mad. I'm going to go write a song," and I did. I wrote from start to finish.

A lot of the songs on A New Reality Mind occupy this very interesting temporal space by being pre-breakup in some parts, and post-breakup in others.

Yeah, and it's pretty annoying to me as well, because I can listen to the beginning of some songs and be like, "You knew what was happening, why didn't you pay attention?!" With the single that I put out before this record, “I'll Get Over It,” it's literally my subconscious trying to be like, “Hello?!”

Do you think that when you write songs, your subconscious is telling you things that you're not consciously aware of yet?

Oh, definitely. It's something that I talk about in therapy a lot. I didn't show my music to my therapist for a while, because I didn't want to give her an assignment outside of therapy, but finally, I sent some things. I was like, "I just feel like this will be helpful," and then later she was like, "Yeah, yeah, those were pretty important," and I'm like, "Oh, yeah." I think sometimes I just write things that I'm like, "Well, don't know what that means, la-di-da," and then later I'm like, "Ugh, now I know."

”I Drew A Line” also has this random snippet of dialogue in the middle. I'm so curious to know, what's that a sample from?

It's from this BBC series called Ways of Seeing, by John Berger. He's a really incredible documentarian who thinks about things in a really cool way. It's about how we consume art, and also how we value art, and why do we place value on old paintings? Is it because they're old and they've survived, or is it because they are masterpieces? Why is a print reproduction of the Mona Lisa not a masterpiece? Or advertising: why are certain images placed next to each other?

I think that's really emblematic of these two coexisting impulses on the record, where on one hand, it's like a very philosophical exploration into a lot of these concepts, and yet, on another, it feels very childlike and playful, especially in a sonic sense. How do you allow yourself to get into that space of childlike experimentation, that “first idea, best idea” thing that we were talking about earlier?

It's really fun to just try weird things, and I think making something, and then not immediately assessing the value of it as marketable, is really important. It's a really fucked-up mind trap that you get in once you start making records for a label. I fired my old management company — I'm outing them here — but I fired them because the head people in management, when I was making Sucker's Lunch, were like, "Why is she even making this record? There's no singles here." It's just like, "What does that mean, there's no singles here, so I shouldn't make something?" That's insane.

On the making side, it can be a real mindfuck if you're like, "Is this the right chord progression for a TV show to buy my song? Or is this the right thing to say so that TikTok uses it?" I feel like you can escape that by just doing weird things and then being like, "Okay, I made that weird thing. Put it on my phone, listen to it for six months. If it annoys me in six months, I'll get rid of it, but maybe it's okay, and maybe it can become the thing that's cool about the song."