Folk singer- songwriter Lucy Kitchen told David Hennessy about her new album, In The Low Light that, made after the passing of her husband from cancer, deals with themes of grief.
Folk artist Lucy Kitchen is about to release her new album, In The Low Light.
Written in the wake of her husband’s death, the album explores themes of loss, grief, memory and transformation but is not all sorrow as there are glimpses of joy, gratitude, and rediscovery too.
For Lucy, the act of creating became a lifeline and a way to process pain and slowly reassemble herself through her music.
The album follows her summer single Red Skies and the recent offering, The Boatman.
It is Lucy’s third album after her 2014 debut offering Waking and the 2017 follow up Sun To My Moon.
Lucy chatted to the Irish World about the new record.
How are you looking forward to getting the album out there?
“I’m very much looking forward to it.
“I’m kind of at that point now where I just want everyone to hear it.”
Inspired by personal loss, I’m sure it’s been emotional. Has the experience of the album been cathartic even?
“I think the experience of the album has actually been really positive.
“Obviously the songs are written, a lot of them, in the run up to and the aftermath of my husband dying from cancer but the actual making of it and going into the studio, I was just so excited.
“It just feels like everything’s coming together.
“The whole experience of making it I just felt it gave me a new focus and a new lease of life and I felt really energised.
“It was quite transformational at that point in the aftermath of my husband dying.
“I just felt like it was like a really big turning point to do something so positive for myself.
“Doing what I love felt quite magic.”
What is it going to be like to play it live? Is it going to get emotional, especially particular songs?
“There’s a couple of songs that are tricky.
“I’ve played all of them live in some setup now.
“I tend to find that it really depends on the audience.
“Some songs I don’t really play unless I feel like the audience is right.
“Chemo Song has to have the right vibe, and The Ways We Were.
“But for me I find when I’m playing live the songs kind of become their own entity.
“It’s not just about me.
“It’s about how they connect with the audience.
“Most of them I’m fine and I play them a lot before I decide to play them live so I know if I can do it.
“If my mum and dad are there, I’m going to find it hard because they’ll cry.
“I think I enjoy the musical elements of the songs and performing them so it kind of becomes passed just being about me and my experience.”
Did Chemo Song come from a time when there was hope that treatment would save your husband?
“Well we knew from the outset that he wasn’t going to survive because he was stage four when he was diagnosed, but I think you always have that hope.
“They said the best case scenario was nine years after diagnosis so you’re kind of hopeful that you’ll get that which we didn’t but we got a lot longer than the worst case.
“I think all the songs have an element of hope or something positive within them.
“They’re not all just really bleak because I’m not a majorly sad person, I’m quite positive.
“I think the songs are sad but I think within that, there’s the fact that I’m always looking at what I want from my life still and not just losing myself to it all.”
The album has themes of loss and grief but also memory and transformation. It’s about celebrating what you have lost as much as the loss, isn’t it?
“Yeah, I think so.
“Everyone has loss in some form so I think for everyone, there’s an element of something that hopefully resonate with them.”
What sort of reactions have you got to the album so far?
“People have been really positive.
“The first single that came out Red Skies was a slightly older one that I’d written and that’s not what I’d call a griefy song.
“That was more of a fun one.
“In My Corner’s done really well. People have really loved that one which I’m really pleased about because it’s one of my favourites on the record.
“And The Boatman is one that I’d released an acoustic live version of before so I feel like people had kind of heard it before but just not in this newer, full band version.
“But they’ve gone down really well so I’m really pleased with the response.”
In My Corner is a special one for referring to losing your biggest cheerleader in life..
“Yeah, and I think that’s often an aspect that’s hard: Just the sudden having to cheer yourself on instead of having someone else doing it.”
The Boatman was the recent single, what made that one special to you?
“I love that song and I love playing it live.
“I feel like it’s one of my bigger songs and with the full band, I love the energy of it, the way it builds up.
“The Boatman is taken from Charon, the ferryman from Greek mythology, who ferries soul across the river so it is grief based and it’s based around crossing but it’s also a little bit about choosing death on your own terms.
“It says in the middle, ‘I want to feel the sun on my face, set sail the wind at my back’, so just choosing when you want to go and how you want to do it and doing it on your own terms.
“But I love that one because we were going to fade it out originally and then Jon and Pat on drums and double bass are just going for it at the end and Tali (Trow, producer) messaged me and he said, ‘We can’t fade it out. We’ve got to just make something of the ending’.
“And I had got the bird song that my husband had recorded in some woods near our house.
“I’d thought we’d put it on one of the quieter songs but Tali put it at the end of The Boatman and it just sounds so good so I was really pleased.”
So as well as much of the record being about his passing your husband also contributed to the recording with the recording of the bird song. Was he a big nature enthusiast?
“He loved nature.
“He was really into birds of prey.
“We moved out of the city early 2021.
“We’re about 10 miles out and there’s loads and loads of red kites here and buzzards and you get the kingfishers up the river.
“You can do this little loop around the river and while he was able, we’d walk that and just see the birds.
“Even when he was having chemo and things, he’d get out whenever he could.
“We were just on the edge of the forest here which is really beautiful and it’s got wild ponies and donkeys and cows and pigs running around.
“I do love a city and I love the buzz of a city but getting out and finding that headspace, I love that.
“Now I’m just that little bit out so I can go and enjoy the city if I want to but I try and walk this little loop around the river whenever I can.
“It’s good for writing, I find.
“It’s good for just stepping out if stuff feels like a bit of a grind.
“I just try and go for a walk out, see the fields, see what I can find to go and look at.”
Tell us about your husband if you don’t mind..
“He was a pianist.
“He was more jazz but he used to write what he called improvised compositions which were kind of somewhere between Bill Evans and Satie.
“I’ve actually had an album of his piano compositions mixed that he’d recorded over the last few years of his life so I’m going to try and release that.
“We had met through music.
“He was just really positive.
“He was one of those big presences.
“He had a massive laugh.
“He loved making people feel comfortable.
“He was really generous.
“He had a dreadful sense of humour which I loved.
“He made absolutely terrible jokes up and I could see them coming sometimes and I’d be like, ‘Come on, it’s coming’.
“And he’d say it and I’d be like, ‘Yes, terrible jokes’.
“He was tall, he had a massive beard and he just played really beautiful music.
“We were together 22 years.”
If you were both musicians, did music bring you together?
“We were alternating gigs in a couple of venues in Southampton.
“He was playing with one collective group of singers and musicians and I was playing with another.
“We were kind of rivals.
“He was always really annoyed because he’d not had a gig one night and he’d come to see me and the rival lot play. Apparently we met but I didn’t remember which remained a bone of contention forever.
“He was always annoyed that I did not remember meeting him.
“He was in a big band called Shine and they were one of the biggest bands in Southampton at the time and they used to pack everywhere out.
“I remember going to see them live and I was like, ‘Oh wow, they’re actually really quite good’.
“And then I bumped into him in a club one night and he bought me drinks all night and then that was it.”
You grew up in Sunbury-on-Thames before moving to Southampton to study music, isn’t that right?
“My original musical dream was to be a professional flautist.
“As a child that was what I was going to do and I was really obsessed with it but when I was about 15 or 16, my dad started bringing home records and tapes for me.
“He worked in a big library in London and he started bringing home Nanci Griffith and Shawn Colvin and some folk and country records for me to listen to.
“I just loved them and I started writing some lyrics.
“When I was 16, I came home from my summer job and there was a guitar on the bed from my mum and dad and as soon as I could play a couple of chords, I started putting my lyrics to music and started writing.
“I still kept going with the flute but I was writing songs and started playing band nights at college so I had the writing bug pretty much from the beginning.
“I still teach flute.
“I teach the next generation of flautists.”
The song Sunny Days features some flute, is that you playing it?
“It’s me doing it and I have to decide if I’m going to do it live at the album launch show.
“This is the big question, ‘Am I going to play the flute?’”
Where did the song Blue Light come from?
“I wrote the first half of that one in the middle of the night the first time my husband got rushed into hospital in an ambulance.
“It was in COVID and I wasn’t allowed to go with him so he just disappeared in the middle of the night basically so I wrote the first half of it then and then the rest of it I wrote about a month after he died.
“Obviously the first bit was when he just headed off and that idea that you’re hoping that someone’s going to be cared for, looked after and they’re going to be fine, because I had no way of of knowing.
“I wasn’t allowed into the hospital.
“But also, the chorus the idea for me was that even though we were going through all of this stuff and obviously it does change your life hugely if you’ve got someone going through cancer treatment but underpinning it all, we were exactly the same.
“We were both still the same people.
“We still had the same hopes and dreams.
“We still liked the same things.
“We still wanted to do things.
“We still had ambition for our lives.
“It was about that, we’re still here.
“We’re still the same people and the love’s the same. It hasn’t changed even though we’re going through all of this stuff.
“It’s the first song I finished after he died actually.
“I’ve got a selfie I took because I’d literally just finished it and I couldn’t believe I’d finished a song because I hadn’t written a whole song for ages.
“It was almost a month to the day after he died I finished it.
“All just came together.”
The song Olivia deals with serious themes..
“I wrote that for a friend.
“Obviously names have been changed.
“She was not in a great relationship so it was almost like a letter to a friend talking about the situation, how do you help someone when they’re going through it?
“That was the angle on that one and that idea of being able to say, ‘Can we take you out of this?’”
You have family that came from Cork and your late husband also had Irish roots, didn’t he?
“My husband’s surname was McCleery and I think his grandparents or great grandparents had moved over to Manchester from Ireland.
“He really wanted to look at the whole Irish ancestry and I think he just kind of ran out of time.
“He’d joined this McCleery Facebook group but he said it was all American- Irish people trying to trace their Irish roots and he was like, ‘This is no help to me at all’.”
And you would like to spend some time in Ireland..
“I would really love to.
“I’d love to come over and play.
“My daughter’s really into myths and folklore and castles and things and she’s like, ‘We must go to Ireland’.
“Maybe I’ll bring my guitar and come and play somewhere.”
Do you have Irish musical inspirations?
“I’ve always loved Lisa Hannigan.
“I just love her songwriting and her voice is just incredible.
“She’s probably my favourite.
“I’ve seen her live and she’s just wonderful.”
I asked you about how it will feel to play these songs live, do you feel your husband is with you as you put this album out there?
“Yeah, I think so.
“I definitely get senses of him, often at really key moments.
“I did a really big full band show in the summer in Southampton, the concert hall there (Turner Sims).
“I was named their Turn It Up artist and I got some funding so I did a full band show and I played not the whole album but a bunch of songs off it and a couple of older ones.
“And just before I played The Boatman- The Boatman was the last song, I got this real sense of him in the room and then I just kind of thought, ‘Well, of course he would be here because this is one of my biggest ever shows’ so it kind of made sense to catch that kind of vibe that maybe he was there in the room.
“He used to just think that I could do anything which I used to find fairly amazing and he’d go, ‘Go on, Luce’.
“So I’d say, ‘I’m thinking about doing this’.
“And he’d say, ‘Go on, Luce. You can do it. Just do it, do it’.
“So I kind of feel like with the album, he’d be there going, ‘Yeah, go on’ and cheering me on.
“He believed in me more than I believed in myself which is a nice thing.
“I feel like he’d be absolutely thrilled that I’m doing this.”
In The Low Light by Lucy Kitchen is out on 27 February.
Lucy plays around the UK from 19 February. She plays Heartbreakers in Southampton for her full band album launch on 1 March and London’s Music Room on 14 March.
For more information, click here.
