10. Kathryn WilliamsHypoxia
Hypoxia is an incredible record. It’s based on The Bell Jar. I’ve never read it though, so I never really got those references. I’d known of Kathryn for years, but I’d never really come across her music and she was the same with me. We met at a festival we were both playing at last year, I was midway through making Telling The Trees at that point. She’s so funny and so much fun, so we were hanging out together, and she agreed to collaborate there and then.
She gave me Hypoxia before I left the festival, and I played it over and over while I was on tour. It’s lyrically really powerful, especially ‘Tango With Marco’ – which sums up the idea of an abusive relationship so succinctly – and ‘Cuckoo’; god, that’s such a beautiful song.
But there’s this one track in particular, ‘Mirrors’. She’d played it at the festival as an encore, she did it unaccompanied, just her voice through a pedal, and it played with words in a very nice way that I really like, and it had this kind of weird blame game going on with herself, and I was like, ah! You’re incredibly insecure too! I got home from tour, and wrote, ‘I Can Hold You Back’ that day, which is by far the longest song on Telling The Trees. It’s kind of two songs put together, the second half of which is basically my version of ‘Mirrors’.
