Look At It In The Light

Description

Kate Bollinger’s songs tend to linger long after they’ve finished playing, filling the negative space of ordinary days with charming melodies and clever phrasing. She writes them at home in Virginia, letting her subconscious guide her, an open-ended process she compares to dreaming. Out of a chord progression comes a phrase, but she says sometimes the words aren’t hers but rather shapes that form in the mind’s sky. While many of them are personal, dealing with emotions that arise when finding one’s place in the world, she prefers them to be open to interpretation, so they might connect with listeners in their own way. Her musical world is relaxed, tender, and unpretentious; it holds a timeless sensibility, a songwriter’s gift for noticing the little things and their counterpoints. Dark and light, pain and pleasure, reality and escapism. All of these are present on her new EP, Look at it in the Light, her first record on Ghostly International. Her project is collaborative; she shoots music videos with her friends and colors each of her folk-pop songs with musicians from her community, who come from jazz backgrounds. Kate got into the habit of writing lyrics quickly from watching her long-time collaborator John Trainum work with rappers in the studio. Forced to finish her last EP in lockdown, Kate, John, and the musicians enthusiastically picked up sessions again in Spring 2021. She wanted to make restrictive decisions and stick to them, rather than leave things open. She wanted to hear certain flaws and phases of the process. Inspired by music from the 60s and 70s, including a lot of old Beatles demos, they focused on direction and clarity of sound. Kate wanted to hear the bass, guitar, drums, keys, and for each instrument to play a part that was good enough to stand on its own. This clarity comes through in the EP’s themes; the title Look at it in the Light refers to aspects of her life that she needs to examine. She surrenders to comfort on “Who Am I But Someone,” a light, softly psychedelic track that evokes the lengths she’s willing to go to avoid having to uproot the familiar things in her life. On “Yards / Gardens,” she’s in fine form, stacking verses loaded with uncertainty over a bright, nimble bassline and kick. Recorded in a session at Matthew E. White’s Spacebomb Studios with arranger Trey Pollard (Natalie Prass, Helado Negro), the string-backed “Lady in the Darkest Hour” is the EP’s most lush statement. Here, her lines sound bittersweet but reassuring, carried by swells of golden-hued instrumentation. From the felted abstractions of “I Found Out” to the biting suspicions of “Connecting Dots,” Kate Bollinger uses every second of this dazzling EP to find her footing amid the constant swings of life.