- 2020-05-10
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Kathleen Releases Debut EP “Kathleen I”: Streaming
Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Kathleen released her debut EP “Kathleen I” on May 8th.
The EP contains 4-track, she recorded it in Colorado and worked with Noah Conrad, Dan Nigro and Ryan Linvil.
She studied creative writing and poetry at the University of Colorado where she garnered several poetry awards and publications.
The EP features stylish pop sound blending her roots like folk and poetry.
Kathleen shared on social media, “Every inch - even the dusty corner details - of this EP is filled with stories and collaboration with my closest friends. It was only possible through all of us combining brains and deep love. We’re in a fucky time right now. Everyone is hurting in different and similar ways. But the worst part is that we can’t be together during it. Right now, I’m sitting in my parents’ basement wearing pj’s and drinking Mezcal with a bad haircut that I gave myself. Whatever your sadness or loneliness is, I hope these 4 songs that me and my dear friends, my team, my label and everyone along the way have put so much labor and love into, can help you through this bizarre, awful, but hopefully eventually, beautiful time. Be kind to each other, be gentle to yourselves.”
She explained each song of the EP below.- “The Longest Year”
“'The Longest Year' really came out of sheer confusion and overstimulation from so much hard and indigestible news. You’re scrolling scrolling and one post is your cousin’s baby, then an ad for organic tampons, then a photo of a dead toddler on a beach in Syria. Your brain is just like duh-waat? So it shuts down. I’d come up with the verse chord progression and was noodling on it with one hand while scrolling Instagram with the other. I remember one post was on Trump, even before he’d hit the primaries, when MAGA was first waking back up from the Reagan era. And then immediately below it was some science account announcing that most of the Great Barrier reef had been pronounced dead. The surreality of the back to back information just struck me so hard. It took me two years to finish the song after that—every line had to come from as truthful of a place. Had to come from that same feeling of insurmountable helplessness, guilt and total emotional exhaustion.”
“Asking the Aspens”
“I’d been thinking a lot about how the Aspen trees in my hometown grow. How sometimes, Aspens grow from seeds, but usually they shoot up from the root system. So a lot of times, an entire grove could be just one tree, shooting up hundreds of little trees from its roots below the ground for tens of thousands of years. The image of a boy growing out of the root system kept coming to mind. Truthfully, I don’t fully know what it means to me, but the line wouldn’t budge so I had to just trust it. The rest of the song was pulled out of two of my poems, called ‘Gravity in Water’ and ‘She is the vascular system of a love song.’”
“Seven Miles”
It’s funny, it almost didn’t make the cut for being just that, discordant. It just felt like it stood out too much from the rest and I was a little scared of it at first for being so different. I wrote the bones of it with Noah Conrad during a time when I was rehearsing with him and a few of our other close musician/producer friends for a show I had coming up. So, we thought, fuck it let’s see if we can flesh out a little live version with this band just for kicks.
Luckily, two of the other musicians (Jonah Summerfield on drums and Ryan Linvill, who co-produced it with Noah) and I had extremely similar taste and influence in new wave music. They just really woke the song up into something I’ve always wanted to make.” - source : Idolator
