‘West Kensington’: a quarantine music collaboration with ‘Hundred Dollar Hoagie’ and ‘Garage Wine’

Harpist Mary Lattimore and guitarist Paul Sukeena lucked into an ideal situation at a less than ideal time. Both transplants from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, the two musicians became neighbors sharing a garden courtyard just as the pandemic hit. Their new West Coast addresses were even situated on a thoroughfare with a very familiar ring: West Kensington Road.

Lattimore and Sukeena had both recently left the Kensington/Fishtown neighborhood behind, having emerged from the fertile music scene that grew up there in the mid 2000s. Classically trained since childhood, Lattimore found a new direction for her harp playing after arriving in Philly in 2005, where she played with Kurt Vile, Steve Gunn, and Meg Baird of freak-folk band Espers, among others.

Sukeena ran in the same circles, cofounding the group Spacin’, recording with The War on Drugs and touring with Gunn before joining the band of singer-songwriter Angel Olson.

So when the two struck up a quarantine collaboration, there was really only one title that made sense for the resultant album. West Kensington was released May 20 on Three Lobed Recordings and features an evocative, immersive, and richly textured set of synth, harp, and guitar drones that may not directly pay homage to the old neighborhood , but certainly is an echo of the musical freedom and camaraderie that the pair discovered there.

“During a certain era in Philadelphia it seemed like everyone that I was friends with was trying to migrate to Kensington,” Sukeena recalled from his new home in Santa Cruz. “It was where all the cool stuff was happening. There were a million bands and a bunch of creative people living there amid all of this activity. So it was pretty wild that when my wife and I moved to L.A., one of the first places we looked at was on West Kensington Road. It felt like we couldn’t leave it, in a way — like it was this current that was always going to follow us.”

When the adjoining apartment opened up in November 2019, Sukeena and his wife urged Lattimore to take it over. At the time, it was just a way to ensure a compatible neighbor would move in. Neither expected to be spending much time there, after all; Sukeena was gearing up for an extensive spring and summer tour with Angel Olsen, while Lattimore was preparing to release her new album, Silver Ladders. Everyone knows what happened next.

“I was so fortunate to have those guys right next door during the pandemic,” said Lattimore from Italy, where she was on tour in mid-May. “I live alone, so we became a real family. I had very close friends that I could play music with but also had that Philly connection, too. Paul and I could also commiserate that our entire livelihood had been taken away.”

They soon found an outlet for their newfound collaboration through a creative enrichment program for Nike shoe designers in Portland. Prior to the pandemic, she had performed live harp for the designers while a teacher demonstrated ikebana, the Japanese art of flower design. Following the shutdown, Lattimore and Sukeena began a weekly livestream for the now-remote workers. They were also enlisted to help score a reading of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach that director Taika Waititi organized with celebrities including Meryl Streep and Camilla Parker Bowles.

Those experiences led to the pair’s first single, “Dreaming of the Kelly Pool” (another paean to their Philly roots), released last May. Over the summer they embarked on a series of improvisations that became West Kensington. For the initial recordings, Lattimore primarily played synth, only later adding her distinctive harp as an additional layer of sound.

A wonderful friend of mine was out of town for the summer and didn’t have air-conditioning in his apartment,” she explained. “He was nervous about leaving his synthesizers behind and asked me to babysit them. I didn’t gravitate toward translating my feelings on the harp during the pandemic like I usually do. I didn’t want to look back later and associate the harp with the virus. I had more fun messing around with these synthesizers because I knew that I only had a finite amount of time with them.”

Both Sukeena and Lattimore view West Kensington as a snapshot of the summer they spent quarantined together, though both refuse to term it a “pandemic record.” The titles reference memories of that strange summer: “Garage Wine” a successful homemade Syrah, “Didn’t See the Comet” a failed attempt to witness an astronomical phenomenon, “Hundred Dollar Hoagie” a well-timed (but expensive) delivery of cherished foodstuffs from back home.

“People always say, ‘This is your pandemic record.’” Lattimore said. “It’s more like our friendship record. It’s a diary of our adventures and our dreams, the deepening of friendship and community, more than it is the story of the clinical horror of a plague.”

In a way it also looks back fondly on a vital and creative moment in Philly music history at a time when the actual West Kensington is going through a transformative period. As Sukeena said, “I see concurrent New York Times headlines [proclaiming Kensington] the hottest real estate market in the country, and then calling it the Main Street of the opioid epidemic. It’s incredibly sad that the people plagued by that are not given more while every square inch of the neighborhood is flipped and there’s a Lululemon on Frankford Ave. But Philly will always be there and its identity will remain strong. It’s a very proud and awesomely brazen place.”

The two artists have left West Kensington Road since recording the album. Lattimore is in a new apartment while Sukeena and his wife relocated to Santa Cruz, where he’s working for a craft brewery and the couple is expecting their first child. But both expect to continue working together and with the other expat Philadelphians that they met in and around Kensington.

As Lattimore sums up, “Philly beyond Philly is the gift that keeps on giving.”