ALBUM REVIEW: Kiely Connell Befriends Herself on ‘My Own Company’

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kiely Connell’s My Own Company was released on July 19th on Thirty Tigers. We’re reviewing it now as part of a year-end round up of some of the best albums we missed along the way this year. 

Reconciling the richness of Kiely Connell’s singing and songwriting voice with the fact that My Own Company is just her second studio album is something of a mind-bending exercise. Surely an artist this seasoned and with this much depth is a longtime road warrior; growth this profound doesn’t just happen. But since her 2021 debut Calumet Queen, the Indiana-born, Nashville-based Connell has done the work for My Own Company, digging into the knottiest stuff of life: the suicide of a friend in her youth, the bleak dating scene in a major city, mental health and addiction. These songs aren’t for the faint of heart, and the way Connell belts them reinforces that, right from the opening notes.

Connell’s background in theatre has undoubtedly influenced her sound and exploration of self. There’s a fearlessness to the way she emotes, channeling the natural strength in her vocals with a practiced precision, letting each run really fill the space. Take a song like “Beautiful,” a gut-wrenching meditation on femininity and coming of age wherein every last word quivers with a life all its own; or the tough gal anthem “Damn Hands,” which finds Connell nearly spitting venom at an unwanted handsy suitor; or the album’s title track, a gospel-level ode to self-forgiveness and acceptance: “Too old for babies and 401ks/And too young to be in so much damn pain,” she growls, inching toward the realization that she just might be her own best friend. And “Through to You,” a banger that opens the set with the vigor of Janis Joplin and the wisdom of a woman twice Connell’s age. “It seems like over time you got so damn self-destructive,” she sings with the most stunning rasp, “Baby can’t last/Ain’t enough sand in your hourglass.”

Connell doesn’t hesitate to turn the same tough love she brings to loved ones on herself, which means My Own Company is a hard look in the mirror at times. The lines get blurred when the messages she’s doling out to others might also be for her own good. It takes real guts to shed any bit of humiliation in favor of maturity and peace of mind, and Connell wields this power like someone who’s truly earned it.