One of the hardest things about a relationship is realizing when to let go. And when the relationship is with a song you’re writing, you can sometimes have just as much trouble knowing when it’s finished.
Both scenarios are at play in “Mourning Girl,” the latest single from British Columbia’s favorite acoustic-pop duo, LooPS. A sad farewell to a love that’s run its course, the song has an arrow-through-the-heart immediacy that belies the long and involved path it took to reach its final form.
In a full-on show of tearjerking balladry, lead singer Kevin Roy pours out a metaphorical 40 to a girl who isn’t coming back, while partner Jon Fennell chimes in with piano and backing vocals that provide a poignant echo:
Mourning girl, filled with dreams left incomplete
A shattered soul left on my own
Mourning girl, I wish I could have seen the sign
She’s left me now, she’s never coming home
The song was first written years ago, when Roy was finding the strength to move on from a long-distance situation, he knew couldn’t survive his stint in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. As a writing exercise, “Mourning Girl” served its purpose, and Roy quickly filed it away, part of a chapter in his life that was closing before his eyes.
Flash-forward to years later, by which time the relationship was long defunct and Roy had developed severe PTSD and retired from the RCMP to pursue music full time. He was working by then with partner Fennell, who came upon Roy’s old demo of the tune and suggested they dust it off, with some key tweaks like replacing Roy’s acoustic guitar with his own keys. A full-fledged LooPS song was born.
It was typical, they say, of the way they work. Hence the name of the band itself, which signifies the unbreakable interdependence of equal parts—and also their use of loop pedals, like the ones that insinuate themselves into “Mourning Girl” as its melancholic tensions mount. Not for nothing, the name is also an homage to Kamloops, BC, the town where the two men met and formed a full-time musical partnership in 2019.
“Mourning Girl” made it to the group’s self-titled first album, which was produced by JUNO- nominated producer and BC Music Hall of Famer Doug Cox and released in spring 2022. But Roy and Fennell had always considered the 11-track LooPS to be basically a demo, and when it came time to step up their game by working at EchoPlant studios with producer/engineer David Ziehr, revisiting the song was one of their first priorities.
The newly re-redone and polished version of the number is actually the second recording to emerge from those sessions. The first was “Last Goodbye,” a summer 2023 single that was slightly sprightlier from a musical standpoint but explored similarly forlorn thematic terrain. That track has generated over 35,000 streams on Spotify alone. While “Mourning Girl” is more obviously and uniformly doleful, both numbers live up to the thumbnail Roy and Fennell commonly use to describe their music: what it would sound like if Ed Sheeran and Lewis Capaldi were to have a musical baby.
Their live shows, though, are anything but somber. In addition to their world-class originals, LooPS maintain a repertoire of literally hundreds of covers, from hits of the 1960s to today’s top 40. It’s why they always go down a treat, whether they’re playing intimate gigs in small venues or high-energy, large-scale shows. And with “Mourning Girl” now out, they’re back on the concert trail to prove it. Current dates are as follows:
June 27 – Deadfall Brewing, Prince George
June 30 – Valhalla Music Fest, Terrace
July 5 – Summerland Waterfront Resort, Summerland
July 12 – Scotch Creek Hub, Scotch Creek
July 19 – Portside Pub in Gastown, Vancouver
July 21 – Overlander Day, Kamloops
July 27 – Stoneboat Vineyards, Oliver
August 2 – Summerland Waterfront Resort, Summerland
These summer shows find Roy and Fennell cruising on the momentum they began to build up on their first BC-wide tour in 2021-22, which saw them playing 12 shows over three weeks in 10 different cities. But that’s nothing compared to the feat they pulled off on July 8, 2023, when they broke a Guinness World Record by performing nine concerts in as many cities starting in Squamish and finishing in Langley within the space of 12 hours. The effort raised $18,402 for the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation.
LooPS have a proud history of supporting charities: On Remembrance Day 2020, at the height of Covid-19, they performed three separate 90-minute livestreamed shows to raise money for the Kamloops Legion poppy fund, and in December of that year, they created a 24-day “musical advent calendar” to benefit The Salvation Army. They ended 2020 with a marathon five-hour livestream in which they rang in the New Year for every time zone in Canada, offering a sense of community and solidarity to their fans in the midst of the countrywide lockdown. Other prestigious appearances by the group have included a six-song set in the Vancouver Island MusicFest, Scotties Tournament of Hearts and Memorial Cup.
All that activity and accrued good will have paid off in spades. LooPS made the top 100 in the 2021 CBC Music Searchlight competition, and they were named Best Band/Singer in the 2022 and 2023 Kamloops This Week Readers’ Choice Awards. Their loyal and rapidly expanding Canadian fanbase now numbers over 6,000 followers spread across all relevant social-media platforms.
To keep the ties with their followers strong, they’ve spent the last two years hosting a weekly podcast series, “LooPS: Diary of an Indie Band”—a personal “accountability journal” in which they tell stories, share their progress as a group and promote other musicians. As of this writing, the podcast has reached over a dozen countries, with over 35 episodes released thus far.
“Mourning Girl” and the current shows are an episode all their own—another installment in LooPS’ ever-deepening romance with the listening public. But unlike the doomed love that inspired the song in the first place, this is an affair that happily has no end in sight.
