A Million Easy Payments- Little Kid  
Released 2/23/24
Reviewer Michael Quint 

It’s not always good to know too much. A Million Easy Payments, the new album from Little Kid, smacks with songwriting built on listening sitting down. Presumably you do a lot of listening when you have made music for over a decade with musicians you’ve known since highschool. Lead singer Kenny Boothby starts the album on Something to Say with the lines “Passing you by when they pass one around /Used to get high but now it gets you down,” sung in his charming hermit voice. It’s an excedingly casual line, on an excedingly casual song about the weight of staying in the same place. Lyrically, the first track earmarks Boothby’s worn-in reality before he thinks hard about “history and the bible” to distill immense declerations of  “bad energy” and muse about the refrains on the sons of Jacob. Which works, Boothby accompanies his Canadian Americana with a real lightness (albiet also with a weariness) that fuses his theologic every-manness with instruments that build with reverence. Beside Myself starts with a goofy near Jason Miraz  guitar strum but culminates in a flute piano crescendo, Somewhere in Between aptly pockets a huge moment within its more straight folk rock gate. When more is not reached for the band turns out songs like Eggshell, which does silly things with the word fragile, and reminds us the limits of a certain cloying sensitivity. The real thing though, is What Qualifies as Silence, which holds hands with Gillian Welch’s masterful I Dream a Highway . These are songs that, through a meaningful repitition of simple parts, allow for the materialism of folk music to link with the spirit of listening. What “Qualifies as silence, The closest I can find” is the line of the phenomonologist of song, it experiences itself and moves on. In this expereince Boothby does not need to sing about heaven, about ancestral rain, or Samson and Delilah, he sings about the things he knows on the surface, and intertwines it with music that erases itself as it goes. 

The Spirit: ****
The Text: ***
The Music: ***.5