7. KashmirThe Good Life
It’s quite selfish of me, but I chose this because my mum signed this band. I didn’t get to go to work with mum often, but I got to go with her to visit them when they were making this record. It was in Lake Tahoe, with a producer and mixer called James Guthrie, who had done a lot of stuff with Pink Floyd over the years. I was really, really young, and it was my first time going into a studio and seeing how albums were made and how musicians did their thing. Hands up, I was incredibly fucking privileged to be in that position and to experience that. And I am so grateful that I was. It was also the soundtrack to so much of my youth, because of how much my mum believed in that band. She would play this record religiously in the car.
It’s a beautiful album. The singer Kasper’s voice is really gorgeous, the songs are beautiful, the band are tight as fuck. The guitars have quite a few effects on them, but the drums are really, really pure. It ebbs and flows: there’s moments that are a lot harder, there’s moments that are very, very soft. And it definitely had an effect on me as a songwriter, because it was around so much growing up. It influenced my style of writing in the sense that I never wanted to be one thing. This band were never one thing – they always had many different sounds and iterations.
For anyone who hasn’t listened to it, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Not just because of its personal connection to me, but also because of the body of work that it is.
