Almond Milk and Luella talk digging deep and growing up
The longtime friends and musical collaborators discuss opening up to new sounds and experiences
Singer-songwriter Liv Whitfield’s parents found her stage name in an unexpected place. They adopted “Luella,” the middle name of their wedding officiant, and added it next to “Nash,” the middle name Whitfield was born with.
“They were like, ‘Oh perfect, if our daughter becomes a country artist she can be Luella Nash,’” Whitfield laughs. “I dropped the ‘Nash’ part and I didn’t pursue country but, you know, close enough.”
Instead, Whitfield’s sound spins sonic gossamer––daydream-inducing and bubbly, its low end tinted with the slink of R&B bass—as Luella. Call it swoon-pop, if you will.
“Honestly, I still don’t know what my sound is,” she confesses. “I’m still experimenting with that, and maybe I never will [know].”
Regardless, Luella’s experimentation has amassed an impressive following. Each of the singles from her May sophomore album, Summer Bummer, has racked up over 10,000 Spotify streams. “Never Been in Love,” a highlight from her debut Luna, sits over the 100,000 mark.
Whitfield’s father, Zane Whitfield, owns North of Princess Studios in Kingston, Ontario, where the two recorded and produced both Luella projects. Summer Bummer found the pair experimenting further, with Whitfield in the throes of an experience begging to be written about.
“I got this crash course in first love and heartbreak, and everything that’s so associated with being a teenager and how messy it can be,” she says. “I felt like it was a goodbye letter to being a girl.”
Zane Whitfield says that, even outside of their personal relationship, working on the record was a very emotional experience.
“There were times when I was mixing and editing things, at my desk bawling my eyes out because some of these lyrics hit so hard,” he says. “You can’t help but get goosebumps at certain melodic parts, when they hit in that way. It can be overwhelming. It’ll bring you to tears and make you well up, or happy and ecstatic.”
It’s an intimate project, invitingly so—a neighbour beckoning you to join their Kodachrome backyard pool party, peach ginger tea in hand. Whitfield cites this beckoning into intimacy as a significant part of the recording process, another rung down the rabbit hole of experimentation.
“I think one of my biggest fears as an artist is to collaborate with other people—I like to be in control of most things,” she says.
Nonetheless, Whitfield started bringing songs to her band and working out parts at practice to record later. Without their outside input, distinct musical moments like the disco-stomp bliss of “GOGO” or the betrayed pleas of the guitars on “Radio Silence” might have never come to be.
So Luella has the band. She has the album. She’s got a summer decorated with a suite of festivals and shows across Quebec and Ontario. The hitch? Midway through her tour, she’s going to need a new drummer.
Simon Vandermeulen Kerr is a Concordia University communications student who performs and produces music as Almond Milk. Like Luella, his catalogue is hard to pin under one distinct sound. Witnessing GILGAMESH, his debut, is akin to watching Spiderman discover the range of his powers. The project is a ferocious rush, vulnerable and intoxicated with promise.
It just so happens that Vandermeulen Kerr grew up as Whitfield’s neighbour in Kingston. It just so happens that, a few years ago, he learned to play the drums.
“I don’t remember why I was over at the studio,” Vandermuelen Kerr says. “But Liv and her dad just spontaneously threw it on me.”
After an unofficial audition at North of Princess, Luella had a new drummer.
“It was a bit of a dice roll because Simon really wouldn’t have called himself a drummer a month and a half ago, short of taking some drum lessons when he was in Grade 6 or whatever,” Zane Whitfield says. “He doesn’t own a drum kit, he didn’t even own drum sticks when he started drumming with us.”
But the Whitfields had a gut feeling that Vandermeulen Kerr’s energy and musicality could bring something special to their show. Within a month he was joining them on stage, and that gut feeling started to pay off.
Promoting and touring Summer Bummer, Vandermeulen Kerr, hard at work on his GILGAMESH follow-up, stumbled into a creative symbiosis.
“It definitely influenced my album a lot because I hadn’t even considered playing live drums for it,” he says. “But 3 of the 12 songs have live drums on them.”
On Sept. 27, Almond Milk performed for POP Montréal at Quai des brumes. His set largely consisted of unreleased material from Simon and the Pop Curse., his album due on Jan. 3.
There was something different about this show; you could feel it in the bluster of the crowd’s revelry. Vandermeulen Kerr was discovering fire, or at least something brand new. Nimble and insistent, his vocals rode the slipstream between pillars of bass that seemed four-dimensional. If GILGAMESH was the sound of a hero discovering his abilities, this was the sound of him putting them to use.
Midway through his set, Whitfield joined Vandermeulen Kerr onstage to perform long-standing live staple “Too Late,” a standout in both their catalogues.
“I’ll spin the block for you, I’m Rubik’s. I’ve got some work to do, I knew this,” sang Vandermeulen Kerr in “Too Late,” a taut track flush with avian Luella harmonies. Throughout the performance, one thing reverberated—Vandermeulen Kerr was taking Almond Milk and his audience somewhere previously undiscovered.
“GILGAMESH, almost none of it was personal experience,” he explains. “It was all my feelings, but using imaginary scenarios and characters to express them. But [Simon and the Pop Curse.] is very literal, drawing from what’s happened to me.”
During Kerr’s performance, this was never more clear than on the album’s centrepiece “Pine St.”
“We knew the truth would hurt us, so we hold on to a lie,” is a line that’s anything but imaginary. It’s real in a way that might seem out of place at a packed bar on a Friday night; but, if Almond Milk was diving into the deep end, this crowd was willing to follow him.
Vandermeulen Kerr and Zane Whitfield joined Luella onstage later that night to round out her sound, her voice an easy injection into their thrumming pocket. Sometimes it just feels good to groove, and a set full of songs like “Peach Ginger Tea” is a reminder of that.
Throughout her set, Whitfield would catch Vandermeulen Kerr’s eyes across the stage. There they were—two artists with wildly different sounds, their feelings tattooed to their sleeves and the wide world in front of them. But in those moments, they were just two friends making music together.
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 3, published October 1, 2024.
