Victoria-based singer/songwriter Kele Fleming recently released “Where the Rivers Meet,” her sixth single from her 2020 record The Song I’ll Write for My Whole Life. The album is an amazing musical joyride that does a great job creating a transcendent musical experience while at the same time conveying Fleming’s message about environmentalism and humanity’s need to work together to fight for a better future for us all.
Fleming says that “Where the Rivers Meet” focuses heavily on her thoughts about the climate crisis.
“I wrote this song while spending some time in the Kootenays in BC, one of my favourite places in the world,” she says. “I spent a lot of time there in the summer of 2019, just about six months before the pandemic started. I was just awed by the beautiful landscape and the beauty of the place, and it got me thinking about how fragile everything is, really. And at the same time that I was writing the song and I was visiting there, there were forest fires raging in different parts of the world, in Europe and Australia and California and BC, of course, too. So the song was really rooted in thinking about trying to turn things around. It’s based in kind of a love song where the chorus goes, ‘Someday I’m going to make this right,” so it’s talking about having a chance to turn things around and make things right.”
As evidenced by the fact that this is her sixth single from last year’s record, Fleming says that she had no trouble keeping herself busy throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
“During the pandemic, I’ve released a full album and about eight singles,” she says, with a laugh. “So I decided to pursue my COVID silver lining and keep releasing music and try to keep active, because you know live music has been a bust during this time… Initially, it was difficult, as it was for many musicians—independent or musicians who are signed. Everything shut down. I had tours planned and had an album release planned for 2020, so I talked to my publicist about it quite a bit and thought about it, and just decided to go ahead and release the album in 2020 anyway, because people need music, no matter what’s going on.”
Fleming says that the pandemic allowed her to make connections in a way that she had not done before.
“Music’s a sanctuary… for us all,” she says. “Also, in a strange way, the pandemic has allowed me to build community in a way that I hadn’t done before. I was lucky enough to connect with a whole bunch of musicians across the world over social media… I’ve got I’d say good friends now in the US and the UK and Australia and other parts of Europe, and we’ve all been kind of communicating about how we’re keeping on keeping on through this time, and we’ve all been working to support each other’s music during this time too, so I hope that as things are opening up that I actually get to meet some of these people in person.”
Fleming says that music to her is a way to deal with difficult subjects and emotions.
“It’s a way to maybe talk about things that aren’t so easy to talk about verbally or face to face, to kind of process difficult emotions. I think The Song I’ll Write for My Whole Life was very much focused on the climate emergency and what’s happening in the world, and so writing the songs on that album was very much a way for me to process my own feelings abut what’s happening.”
Fleming says the main thing that she wants her audience to take away from her music is that there’s still time to make positive changes, for the benefit of both humankind and the environment.
“The album is really about processing my own grief and my own complicated emotions about the future of this beautiful planet that we live on. I guess one message would be that there’s still time. Our world leaders are gathered in Glasgow for COP26 [the United Nations Climate Change Conference] and there’s a lot of talk and not a lot of action, and I think that the album is really about hope and trying to pull that action and that hope into concrete action so that we can keep our place that we live in and have a future together here.”