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What Is Life? (album)

2021 studio album by Brett Kissel

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionOct 31, 2025
Entity authorityQ106075659 ↗
Source-derived summary

What Is Life? is the fifth major-label studio album by Canadian country music artist Brett Kissel. It was released on April 9, 2021, through Warner Music Canada, and ONErpm in the United States. It includes the #1 Canada Country hit single "Make a Life, Not a Living", as well as "Night in the Life".

Background

Kissel believes the COVID-19 pandemic changed the music industry and that music needs to "bring people together safely, tell the story, distract from the real challenges going on in the world right now". At the onset of the pandemic, Kissel felt lacking of creative spirit and did not write songs for six months. He began writing again in late 2020 and early 2021, and says that from this album forward he will spend the next few years focusing on telling a story with his music and not focusing on profit. He remarked that the song "Die to Go Home" was the "most emotional" for him as it was "super vulnerable" and a story he felt he would never share, while he called "Slidin' Your Way" an "ode" to 1990s country group Diamond Rio.

Development

Kissel says this album is "not really hit driven" rather it is "heart driven". In order to make the album more important to him, he recorded some of the songs on his farm in Alberta, and took all of the photos for the album and its liner notes on the farm he grew up at.

Editorial summary

The public source identifies “What Is Life? (album)” as 2021 studio album by Brett Kissel. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around What, Life and album.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2021, 2020—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2021-04-09. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with What, Life and album providing the first useful test.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “What Is Life? (album)”, the useful work is to connect “2021 studio album by Brett Kissel” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 31, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q106075659. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2021 and 2020.

Critical limits

Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

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  2. Expand the search: follow What Is Life? (album) primary sources, What Is Life? (album) archive and What research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “What Is Life? (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.