Not to romanticize what was a crazy stretch of excess, but Colleen Rennison has been through some hellish times, with the stories to prove it. And, as can be the case when the road gets tough, the various challenges eventually proved something of a blessing—this borne out by her gorgeously ambitious new album Persephone.

The Vancouver-raised singer’s second solo record—and first featuring her own songs—will surprise those who’ve followed her music career for the past decade. After shifting her energies from acting to music in her early twenties, Rennison formed Vancouver’s No Sinner, establishing herself as an alt-country powerhouse with a killer case of the blues. And then, after two full-lengths, plenty of hometown buzz, and no shortage of liquor-fuelled drama, things went off the rails in dramatic fashion. For a good while, the singer’s life spiralled into something of a screaming mess.

Out of that mess came Persephone, a record that suggests Rennison’s days of drinking Jack Daniel’s straight from the bottle in Daisy Dukes and vintage cowboy boots are behind her.

She argues that “pop” is a good catch-all label for the songs, which kind of works but also doesn’t. With Rennison and producer Felix Fung shooting for a vibe best described as throwback-cool, the album’s nine tracks also offer everything from two-martini jazz to swinging R&B to church-service gospel.

As a work of art it’s a bold move forward—one more rooted in ’40s Hollywood, ’60s Motown, and ’70s Nashville than No Sinner’s neon-lit American roadhouses. As a work of redemption? That’s a little more complicated. It doesn’t, however, stop the 35-year-old singer from gamely trying to explain what Persephone means to her on a personal level.

“The record is really about the demise of a relationship,” Rennison says. “And the band. And everything. That’s how a lot of these songs took shape. But then, even as the record was being put together, umm... Really, it’s all just been a fucking whirlwind for the past seven or eight years. It’s been crazy. But it’s started to settle down and make sense again.”

IF THE MAIN goal in one’s life is to keep moving forward career-wise, Texas wasn’t exactly a bright spot. Rennison’s time in the Lone Star State came before the recording of Persephone, and after the implosion of the band that put her on the frontlines of the Vancouver music scene. For those keeping score, there was also a 2014 solo album of covers, See the Sky About to Rain.

Feeling like she needed a fresh start after breaking up No Sinner, the singer moved to Austin around the time Donald Trump was moving into the White House. She quickly found a community, falling in with musicians grinding it out on the club circuit. 

“This is what these guys do for a living in Texas—play for three or four hours, maybe making 80 dollars each,” Rennison says. “They’re playing five gigs a week, barely scraping by and making rent. If their guitar player can sing, they don’t need a singer—you don’t want to split the cheque any more ways than you have to. They’d get more tips when I’d get up there in my cute floral dress and sing a couple of songs. So I was singing a lot—three or four nights a week. They didn’t want to pay me, but everyone loved it when I’d come and sing with their band. And I’d get free drinks all night.”

Eventually, she realized that Austin was part of a pattern, including the drinking, that had gone on for years.

“It was a lot of two steps forward, three steps back,” she says. “I kept picking myself up, dusting myself off, and then falling down again. And I’d do it more and more.”

Raised in Kitsilano, Rennison first crashed the entertainment world as an actor, piling up IMDb credits in both television shows (Poltergeist: The Legacy, Stargate SG-1) and Hollywood films (The Story of Us with Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer, the Sally Field-directed Beautiful). In the early 2000s, the world discovered she could also sing after a television talent contest teamed her up with Grammy-winning MOR producer David Foster. Later, a stint studying acting in New York led to a brief business deal with Eminem’s Shady Records.

If those extremes sound insane, that’s exactly the point.

“Growing up in the early 2000s was a pretty crazy time,” Rennison reflects. “A lot happened, especially being in the music industry, and the hip-hop community, and being young and vulnerable and eager, and having people take advantage of you. Then there was being a young actress—there was a lot to unpack.”

Rennison started drinking at age 13, so it was perhaps inevitable that, when it all started becoming too much, alcohol became her coping mechanism.

“I would drink rather than deal with things when they came up,” she says. “Distract myself in some way.”

From Hank Williams to Hank Williams III, Darby Crash to Amy Winehouse, there’s something romantically reckless about drinking and playing music. That goes double when you’re filed under shit-kicking rock or hell-raising alt-country—labels which both fit No Sinner. Looking back, Rennison was more than happy to step into a part played by countless others before her.

“Everybody always gave me the Janis Joplin treatment,” she remembers. “I kind of figured I would either make it, or die by the time I turned 27. So mistakes I made included trying to keep up with the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. Behaving in ways that I thought I was supposed to in order to fit the persona I thought I needed to have. I’d always used weed growing up—self-medicating with it—you do that in Vancouver. I was using it regularly since ninth grade. It wasn’t until I started touring with No Sinner and was away from weed that things changed.”

As thrilling as touring might be at the beginning, the grinding monotony of the van, shitty motels, and $10 per diems eventually start to wear thin. As much as she still loves the band today, No Sinner—which, for trivia fans, is Rennison spelled backwards—eventually became what the singer describes as a toxic environment.

“We weren’t getting along,” she reflects. “I was inexperienced—everybody was sort of inexperienced. I really didn’t know how to tour, so I wasn’t even sleeping properly. So to get through it I would self-medicate like crazy. I started drinking in the morning because I couldn’t smoke weed. That’s really when it became a problem—I started needing it, and using it, to get my job done.”

As lineup changes occurred in No Sinner, the drama intensified—including a relationship implosion with a bandmate and a related personal betrayal better saved for Rennison’s future memoir than recounted here. Finally, she accepted that No Sinner was over and lit out for Texas.

“The band fell apart, my relationship fell apart, and when those two things disappeared I sort of picked up the pieces and tried to put them back together again,” she says. “But everything kept falling apart. I really didn’t have anything particularly solid to fall back on. I was just sad and broken.”

Austin didn’t give her the fresh start, or the answers she was looking for. But that, in hindsight might have been a good thing. Instead of continuing to numb the pain, Rennison eventually decided to find some ways embrace it.

Returning to Vancouver, she started putting in the work that led to Persephone. 

WHILE IT MAY not be the most poetic way of articulating things, Rennison describes the start of the album’s recording process like this: “It was kind of like shit or get off the pot.”

She was aware her lost years had, in a strange way, been a gift—one that led to her stockpiling songs amid all the craziness and chaos.

“After No Sinner broke up, I wanted to make a solo album but I didn’t have a band, and I didn’t have a label,” she recalls. “And I was too fucked up to be playing too much music anyway. But I had this handful of songs to commemorate the most adult, emotional events I’d ever been through.”

With COVID ripping across North America and the world in lockdown, Rennison was contacted by a former roommate and long-time No Sinner disciple named Stephen Jeffery. The two reconnected big time when the singer made a trip to Salt Spring Island. When Rennison talked about wanting to make a solo record, Jeffery told her that he had the resources to make that happen.

“I think, at the time, he didn’t exactly know the magnitude of what he was getting himself into,” she suggests. “I know I didn’t—I thought, ‘Okay, cool, maybe it will cost $10,000 or whatever.’ But we really went for it. Albums are expensive to make. They really take a lot of work, they take a lot of people, and they take a lot of encouragement.”

That’s doubly true when you’re going widescreen in your ambitiousness. The singer hit the studio with producer Fung, and a black-aces backing band dubbed the Wrecking Crew: guitarist Stephen Fischer, bassist Max Sample, keyboardist Alexander Ward, and drummer Shawn Mrazek. Having the world in lockdown gave everyone the luxury of staying extra-focused on the project. And, pretty quickly, they knew they were making something amazing.

Rennison hasn’t completely walked away from her roots on Persephone. Flared with killer Grand Ole Opry guitar, “It’s Not Raining” throws back to a golden era when Loretta Lynn and Tanya Tucker were the queens of AM-country radio. (Bonus: Kinky Friedman and David Allan Coe would both approve of lines like, “Don’t you piss on my shoes and tell me it’s raining.”)

But what really hits big on Persephone is the way Rennison has worked to reinvent herself. With its cascading piano and torch-blues vocals, “Fork in the Road” lands centre stage at Blue Velvet’s Slow Club, while the sun-flooded soul ballad “I Do” is made for a month of lazy Sundays.

Rennison also isn’t afraid to rip it up, with “Crawling on the Ceiling” falling somewhere between The Best of Jeannie C. Riley and the Strokes if they’d recorded for Stax in ’60s London. But she’s also discovered the power of restraint, whether updating ’70s MOR for 21st-century DIY die-hards on “Circles”, or melting into a bed of CinemaScope strings on “The Taker”.

“Felix has wonderful taste, and we were really on the same page in terms of what we wanted the songs to be,” Rennison says of her producer. “We wanted to do something cinematic—sumptuous and luxurious. Something that drew you in and told a story, with little Easter eggs all over the place. We were referencing great albums by people like Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry, where they had full orchestras, and the songs led into each other, so the album was a real experience.”

RENNISON’S GREAT TRICK on Persephone is sounding like someone who’s come out of the very darkness that inspired many of the tracks.

“The songs are very much like an inner dialogue that kind of just materialized,” she notes. “I didn’t really write them, they kind of revealed themselves, and then I just had to arrange them.”

Today, every experience, including the bad ones, is seen as a gift. So when she sings, “It’s been three years and 39 days since I left for the Prairies” and, “I know you don’t love me/And you’re never, ever, ever, ever going to love me again” in the gorgeously symphonic “Means To An End”, what comes through isn’t sorrow, but love for a relationship that was once beautiful.

Still, some cuts went deeper than others over years—this evidenced by “Some Things You Lose” lyrics like, “I’ve had my fill of honky tonks/Free pour shots and cold tall boys in Texas/Living in the past, and fogging up the glass of what might have been.”

“That’s an intensely personal song,” Rennison says. “I liked the concept of some things we lose, and some things we leave behind. I am someone who loses a copious amount of things on a regular basis. It’s astonishing the amount of things I lose, and it’s a recurring thing. But I’ve also lost a lot of things you can’t touch. A lot of relationships. I’ve lost opportunities. I’ve lost respect, and self-respect. Status. Confidence. All of the above. Sometimes things get taken from you. Sometimes it’s your fault, and sometimes it’s not fair.”

Persephone turns the page on all that.

“I exorcised the demons by getting the songs out, and that was good,” she says simply. “It was like a big weight had been lifted.”

And at the same time, the album showed her there was still plenty of work to do, both professionally and personally. She was still in the thick of the shit, messed up and confused, while recording it. Once it was done­, she accepted that she’d have to get things together—handling everything from promotion to playing shows—if the record was going to have a chance.

Determined to get her life together after completing Persephone, she decamped to Mexico, consciously removing herself from the temptations surrounding her in Vancouver.

“I realized that I had to do something drastic­—that it wasn’t going to be only drinking beer, or going home after only having three drinks,” she reflects. “I knew I had to stop. That was the only option for me. There was no one real fireworks moment. It was more like carnage—the degeneration of my state of being is what got me, and how far I’d allowed it to go. I looked at people who had to go to treatment, and thought, ‘You just suck at drinking. You don’t have any control.’ And then I got to a point where I didn’t.

“It just wasn’t enough,” Rennison continues. “It wasn’t the fact that I got really drunk—that was the bad thing. It was more that, no matter how much I drank, I was a bottomless pit. It was no longer my friend. No longer this tool that I used as a saviour for so long. It was like, ‘This is the enemy now.’”

The moment of clarity that finally led her out of the darkness came while in Mexico as COVID dragged on. Rennison was scheduled to fly home when she lost the phone containing the vax pass needed to get back into Canada.

“I didn’t have my passwords, or anything like that, so I was stuck in this tiny little town,” she says. “And I just stayed there for a while. And I started making music.”

These days, making music continues to be enough.

“As you get older, your definition of what success is changes,” Rennison says. “There was certainly a point in my life where I thought I was going to be Britney Spears. That was pre-head shaving, pre-breakdown Britney Spears, so then you become glad you were never put in that position. Today, I’m just thankful that I’ve been supported enough that, as an artist, I have another piece of art to put out into the world. I wanted to get these songs down so I could move forward. I knew they were some of my best work. And I knew that, for another chapter in life to open, I needed to let go.”