It was summer-time music, typically bright, loud, upbeat and Californian or at least somewhere a lot sunnier than northern England. The video sealed the deal: Miller was having such enormous fun blasting out these songs that I immediately bought into her music. Her voice is just so loud and clear somehow. She’s a natural.

I knew Miller had spent the winter working on a new album, only her second, and I was keen to hear more. Then, a few weeks ago, she released the first track off that album, For You. I understand it was written a while ago, alongside some songs from her self-titled debut album but it feels darker, sadder. There is often a wistful melancholy behind Miller’s songs.

Sometimes when I’m driving all alone again,
I get in my head
Sometimes when I see the city lights in bed,
I remember when the lights just felt like ours
When we said goodbye
Oh you’re still the only one on my mind

Her songs are lively and bright and are best played very loud. But they often speak of separation, of distance, or heartbreak. It’s a kind of sad angriness that makes it more believable and totally human, totally her. She’s annoyed but still sad while also preparing herself for another round.

For You captured my imagination rightaway, not least because she chose to put a famous London bridge on the cover. Not ‘the’ London Bridge, of course (this has caused confusion in America in times gone by) but Tower Bridge, the one with the famous roadway that lifts up for boats. It’s a winter song, a winter photograph, and it just grows on you the more you listen. It is achingly sad, almost haunting, and the perfect song for a city snowstorm.

Every night I told you all my pretty lies,
It would buy me time
From falling back asleep without you waking next to me,
I think of when
The lights just felt like ours

Miller was one of the first artists to really latch onto my writing last year, and we would message every couple of months. When I heard she was coming to London this month for a short tour of the UK, Ireland and Sweden, the first thing I did was buy a ticket for the Holborn show on August 5th. The second thing I did was try to get hold of her for a short chat. I just asked the most obvious questions I could think of that I had not seen answered anywhere else.

What do you enjoy most about touring in the UK?

Miller: “I love touring over there so much because I think UK audiences tend to dive deeper into the music. They always ask more questions about the lyrics and the meanings behind songs. They look up the catalogue. They seem really involved when they go out to see an artist. It’s a lot less of a passive experience when I play there.”

Why did you choose London’s Tower Bridge for the artwork on For You?

Miller: “I chose Tower Bridge for the artwork because I love the iconography of it. I took that photo when I was in London on my very first tour run. And so it was winter, it was cold, it was gray. And I was just kind of like scrolling through and this is exactly what I was writing about. And I didn’t really realize it. That feeling of just... you’re alone but with a lot of people around you.”

What can you tell us about the second album?

Miller: “So you know that For You is the first single. The second single is a cover of a Radiohead song called Let Down… I’m so excited! The rest of the record is going to roll out through the fall and winter. It’s ready to go.”

Are you all ready for the tour?

Miller: “It’s going to be a really intimate, fabulous show. It’s a presentation of the album and a really great preview of what’s to come. And it’s your chance to get to see it up close and personal versus on some of the other tour runs. It’s a different type of venue. I’m going to bring a trio for sure.”

Miller was calling from her log cabin, I kid you not, deep in the Montana hills, or woodlands, or… just imagine wilderness. She lives in the middle of nowhere and seems full of energy, happy and relaxed there. It’s the perfect antidote to life on the road and in the big cities.

The London gig will be Miller’s only London headline show in 2026 and it will be an intimate evening at the air-conditioned (phew!) Pizza Express Live venue in Holborn. She is bringing a trio, including a drum kit, so you will get the full pop-rock Miller Campbell experience. I have seen her live at Bush Hall doing a solo show and that was seriously impressive. Her voice really shines in that context, but I am beyond excited to see her with the band this summer.

You can still grab tickets for Miller Campbell’s tour run across the UK and Ireland, with an additional show in Sweden this July and August. She posts regularly on both Instagram and TikTok. Her cover of Let Down is out soon!

Known to gossip with full moons and greet the rising sun, Los Angeles native Niina Soleil has a heart that beats in one long love letter to California. An architect of technicolor dreams, Niina is liquid sunshine splashed with country twang. She is a go-go-boot-wearing siren with an imagination as vivid and doomed as a tarot reading. She resuscitates the lilting melodies of seventies pop with vocals that transition seamlessly from melancholy to playful, sincere to chiding.

Gossiping with the moon! Hello Kitty Coen fans! This one is for you. And my algorithm thinks there are similarities with Cat Burns and Donna Missal too.

Although the new album is not quite out yet, there are several singles to plot a course by. The title, CALIFORNIALAND, immediately called to mind that long-forgotten housing development called HOLLYWOODLAND. Perhaps you have heard of it?

Music should be about the music, of course. We all agree on that. The music needs to be A1 to cut through the noise these days. (Is that A-One or AI? Ed.) But when an artist brings a look, a persona and a ZFG attitude it really helps, and just one reel from Niina convinced me that she is the full package.

There are a few contemporary artists that really sell an attitude, not least Kassi Ashton and Cyrena Wages. They bring the music, of course, but they bring that little bit more somehow, the icing on the cake. The coke on the mirror. This might be the land of the Valley of the Dolls, that iconic Jacqueline Susann novel.

My favourite of the new ones was the first, Welcome to the Dream. This is when the party is just getting going. Kick off your shoes, chillax. This is the best place on earth. But is that lady in the middle really human? She’s either on drugs or a robot. Oh no, is it too soon to leave? Even this banging optimisitic opener is tinged with warning signs.

Welcome to the Dream of California!
Come on, swim the seas where I was born-ia!
Kick off your shoes, kick off your blues,
But baby, I should warn ya-
Things ain't all they seem

Ramblin’ runs it a close second. It called to mind Stuck in the Middle with You by Stealers Wheel. I love it. It’s a great chuggin’ driving song. Not too slow to open up the V8 on the dark desert highway.

In Life & Times of a Wannabe Rockstar we have a moment of reflection. A quiet opening with only an acoustic guitar, this one really shows Niina’s range. And yes, you need both eyes, it’s not Nina.

Sleep in your denim and stay up for the sunrise
Empty bellies sing elegies of last night
We're crawling into the light
Life and times of a wannabe rockstar

Every song has something different to offer. I was drawn to Happy Pills, partly through my own experiences with such. The last of the new ones, actually the most recent to be released, is Tequila Tears. This is a darker, Amy Winehouse vibe.

I tell him, "Listen to yourself and take a hint-
It wasn't like she was some saint, can't you admit
That she was cruel to you?"
But he just sighs and rolls his eyes.
"She was the devil,
But I could never tell her no."
Tequila tears begin to roll

You can catch Niina on tour right now! Well, in August. Tickets here. Her full website is here and you can find her links and email list here.

A friend recommended him to me and I am really glad they did. Cameron offers something different, and his recent album CRK arrives at the perfect moment to help us calm down and cool off in the hottest summer for half a century.

Cameron Knowler’s main focus is the guitar, and typically an acoustic guitar, and making the guitar the star of the show. As well as playing his own instrumental music, he plays as a sideman based out of Nashville, although he spends a lot of time over in LA too.

His journey is as fascinating as it is unusual. Cameron grew up in a desert town in Arizona, famous for growing nearly all the lettuces in the whole of the USA (I know!) and a high school that used to be a prison. It sounds like the perfect starting point for a road movie, or possibly a horror movie.

One of Cameron’s key inspirations was Norman Blake, a legend in roots and folk music. Cameron also teaches and talks eloquently about the guitar in various podcasts and YouTube videos. It feels like the guitar is the anchor for his musical life but he is also a keen student of its history and future.

“Pure musical expression pulling from over a hundred years of American folk history but still feels unburdened by the past and looks sharply towards the future of what the guitar can be. Everything you want from an instrumental guitar record is all here.”
– Hayden Pedigo

As regular readers of the Vibes will be aware, I tend to focus on the lyrics and the story behind a song. Without a song to write about, I have found the writing process to be more lateral and pleasurably challenging. Can an instrument tell as good a story as a poem or song lyric? I argue that yes, it can. Knowing about Cameron’s desert upbringing and watching his tutorial on George Riley Puckett, another legend, helps me understand his approach.

One problem I have always had with punchy songs, especially with drums and electric guitars, is that they can sometimes be a little too engaging. It surely isn’t healthy to blast Born in the USA out of a convertible car stereo in July, fun though it might sound. There’s no way you can keep below the speed limit.

So often, especially when driving at night, I will turn to BBC Radio 3. It might not be very famous in Tennessee but it provides a mix of more mindful music from the old classic orchestras to roots and folk music, but it’s nearly always instrumental.

At college, one of my room mates was an avid fan of John Williams. My friend was a pretty solid guitarist in his own right and went to every John Williams concert he could find. If you are thinking, as we all did, that it’s the guy who wrote the music for Jaws and ET you would be entirely wrong. It didn’t appeal to me back then, but it really does now in our overloaded, over-stimulated black mirror world.

There’s something extra special about guitars. The best ones are handmade, a process I learned a lot about last year when covering Regina Ferguson and Emmanuelle Pickett’s documentary about the making of Regina’s Ren Ferguson guitar called Lucky. I found out that a guitar maker is a luthier.

The guitar was the one instrument we all wanted to play when we were teenagers, and there is still something magical about it. It is an inherently analogue instrument in a digital world. You can’t get an AI robot to play one, unlike the keyboard or synth. It is heartening and inspirational to find, in Cameron Knowler, a Gen Z artist so committed to the future (and the history) of the guitar. It is the absolute antithesis and antidote to all the claptrap we are forced to listen to about doing things the artificial way.

Cameron is clearly a gifted guitarist and I’ve really enjoyed playing his music over the last week or so. If you’re quick there is still time to catch his UK and Ireland tour this week!

Cameron Knowler is also a prose writer. His writing can be found at Acoustic Guitar Magazine and Fretboard Journal. Click HERE for an in-depth interview with Cameron on the Fretboard Journal podcast. His instrumental music can be found on Bandcamp.

I always hate July
So slowly creeping by
And suddenly it ends
And it’s August again

The thing I like most about traditional country songs, which are often a little slower and with a swing to them, is that they showcase the lyrics and storytelling. Whatever you think of July, you might well have changed your mind by the end of this song. Does it feel like the year is running away from you? We’re past half-way now. Have you planned Halloween? Any thoughts about Christmas?

My clothes don’t seem to fit
And I can’t get over it

I can just about remember when we had a different climate. Summer here used to be August, really, the main month of the school holidays. But now it is June that is nice, July is too hot and August is basically autumn. In a world without air conditioning (you guys never can get your head around that!) then anything over 30 degrees is monstrous. Because it always comes with crazy humidity. And 30 here is really 86 in Texas! We have had several days nudging 100 with humidity around 50% or higher.

Maths lesson over. There are more serious matters at hand. We just doubled our stock of fans. To 2. Like I said, no AC except in the cars. Some people have gone for a drive just to cool off.

And this skin don’t feel like mine
There’s way too many lines
I pass the mirrors by
So I don’t see what I look like

I didn’t much like July when I first heard this song, and now I truly hate it. But what is KC’s favourite month? Surely she would hate January too?

Katrina Cain is absolutely brilliant and brings unexpected takes on modern life to the party. She has her own website and is (still reluctantly!) available on Instagram and TikTok. My personal preference is always the email list.

If, like me, you thought Erewhon was Nowhere spelled backwards and the name of an 1872 novel by Samuel Butler, you would be wrong on both counts. As everyone knows, Erewhon is in fact the store in Los Angeles for all manner of groovy goods, not least toiletries and beauty. They also do a line of ready-to-go drinks, so I’m told, and cannot open new outlets fast enough to satisfy demand. Sort of a Whole Foods Market on steroids, althought not steroids because they’re not natural.

Armed with this knowledge, Anna’s latest song makes perfect sense.

Anna May told us: “When I first wrote Crying at Erewhon, I wanted a recording that reflected the analog echo and golden-brimmed recordings of LA favorites like the Mamas and the Papas, the Carpenters, and the Beach Boys… to really give the song the glistening glow that it deserved, but I decided that it would be too dated and I wanted the song to sound like something brand new. I think that it totally does.”

For someone who hardly ever visits California, I enjoyed the name checking of various areas and neighbourhoods. Places I have heard of before, places I have not. Whereas an Anna May song will typically be more universal and not tied to place, this one is the complete opposite. Were it not such a sad vibe you can imagine a licensing deal.

Anna shows us that it is possible to be sad and angry but also funny at the same time. She cannot understand, and I share her confusion, why men seem to be singularly unequipped for adult relationships. I generally take the easy way out and just say that it must be American men who behave this way, that British men never would.

Perhaps this one is a little more like The Cliff than Fireflies and Buffalo. By that I mean there is more of the humour, slightly more literal lyrics. It’s a little bit shorter than her average at only six minutes. I’ve been listening for weeks and I can say it grows on you very much. I still smile when it comes on.

Anna is so busy touring that she doesn’t have long to mourn the loss of another relationship as she cradles another smoothie. There is always another plane ticket waiting to be used in the drawer. This is one of my favourite Anna May songs because although she might be sad, she can still come out with funny sarcasm. She might be down for now, but she hasn’t been knocked out.

Anna May thinks deeply about the world and her music, and performs so often it is tiring just following her on Instagram. You can catch up with Anna May on her own website and on all the usual streaming services. Anna is also active on YouTube.

When I first saw the title of this one I really did believe it would be a light-hearted summer song. I was naive. I now realise I don’t want or need a light song from CW. I’ve always been into Stephen King and David Lynch. You might compare this one to Lana Del Rey but there’s no need. There are a few indie contemporary artists who appear happy and bubbly IRL but deeply dark in their music like Zandi Holup and Kitty Coen. Their sadness makes us happy.

As you might expect, this is no ordinary day trip. As far as I can make out, this is a different sort of trip altogether. There are hints of drugs and insomnia. She’s married now, but she’s still crazy AF and she knows you wouldn’t want it any other way. We were born to be wild... words that sound familiar somehow from a classic song about biker gangs.

We got drunk by design
Bored with the everyday
Planning a great escape

“Kisses drippin’ off me like wine” is a great line. The singer is known to be a fan of red wine, and (heaven forbid) has been known to put ice cubes in it. I’m told that is all the rage now. Not fully chilled red wine as such, but certainly not summer room temperature either, which in this heatwave would be as hot as black coffee. If you’re not putting the red in the fridge you’re missing a trick.

Writers of all kinds find their heads full of one too many thoughts. In that sense writing becomes an impulse, a way to explore and dilute the voices, to reduce their volume. Cyrena sometimes labels this as being ‘heady’, someone with too much going on upstairs to be quite the full shilling.

What has been thrilling over the last year has been watching her explore these characters and personas not only in her music but also on socials and even here on Substack. If you think you have a house guest or two in your head, imagine what it would be like with a full village fete going on up there. Or a picnic from Alice in Wonderland.

These songs are harder to write about than Vanity Project, Cyrena’s brilliant debut album. There’s rarely a neat, tidy story that explains itself. They’re deep and difficult, dealing with big feelings. There is talk of death and something like betrayal. There is love, but the dark sort. The life or death sort. The Catherine Earnshaw sort.

A little bit of empathy
Just a touch insanity
Baby we were born to be wild

The vocal delivery is deliberately muted, unusual for a CW song, and it makes me wonder if the singer is even alive. Could she be a ghost? She sings about the past. But what of the present? Did everyone make it out alive?

You can stream Daytrippin in all the usual places and find out more on CW’s website. You can presave sophomore album Miss Melancholia! here.

It was always written as a country song, but I first put it out in a different direction. After playing it live over time, the audience reaction has been really consistent. People kept asking for the original version, so I decided to finally release it properly.

This version is a stripped-back folk ballad built around the idea of “don’t judge a book by its cover,” and it features a collaboration with folk/singer-songwriter Ed Tattersall, who brings a really special tone to the track.

There was a lot for me to dig into with this one, because of course I went straight away to listen to the earlier single. I loved them both at first listen, and I love nothing more than following different versions of a song as it evolves through time.

See this girl, she's a woman
Trying hard to make her mark
Don't tell me I'm too young to understand it
I've been down to hell and back

There is a lot of sadness in the song, and perhaps more so in this new country version. I found the saddest idea to be that there are so many people in the world she will never have the time to meet all of them. That’s one of the things that separates a prose writer from a songwriter: that same thought fills me with dread! I’d much rather have a DM parasocial friendship than stumble out into the real world, eyes blinking against a hot sun.

There are so many people out there to meet
There are too many lives that I could live
And so few hours to spend my days
Don’t be fooled by all the numbers
Or by all the words that I write

This makes it even more surprising that I actually ran into Pien IRL at Lil Nashville, Chiswick a few weeks ago. She was sadly not performing that day but there are several opportunities to catch her live this summer. And yes, Pien is her real first name!

Pien is an Indie-Americana artist based between London and the Netherlands, and she would definitely appeal to fans of Ella Langley, Suki Waterhouse, Fleetwood Mac and Kacey Musgraves. So basically everyone in the world, including you. I am also a new fan of Suki Waterhouse, who played the ‘sort-of’ Christine McVie character in Daisy Jones and the Six.

You can get tickets to see Pien this summer here. You can catch her in London several times as well as Isle of Wight, Chichester, Hertford, Worcester and others. Her website is here. You can of course catch her on Instagram and TikTok too!

Back in 2008, before Spotify and before Netflix really got going, HBO ruled the airwaves. I was not a father and not a husband and if you wanted anything other than BBC you had to get something called a satellite dish because where I live cable TV was never a thing.

2008 was the year we bought our first house and it was in Buckinghamshire and it came with a pre-loaded satellite dish. In a dark, wet and grey country like ours, there was only one thing to do and that was to get Sky. Shortly after that, when F1 moved to Sky, it became an essential part of our home entertainment.

At exactly this moment in history, HBO had decided that Charlaine Harris’s vampire novels, totally unknown in the UK, deserved a bigger audience. They cast the ethereal Anna Paquin as Sookie Stackhouse and put together the most terrifying opening credits I have ever seen, in which maggots eat a dog carcass. We gulped. This was our sort of thing.

True Blood had all the glamour, sex, death and music you could ever wish for and it deserved its enormous audience. It might be the only TV series I ever bought the soundtrack for and of course, this being 2008, it was on CD. We still have the disc in the loft but I immediately ripped the CD onto my hard drive and put it on something we called an iPod so I could listen on the move.

In the days when people actually bought music as a physical object, we really used to listen hard. Speaking only metaphorically, I wore that disc out. There was no plastic left on it, it was just that rainbow piece of foil left.

On that disc was a catchy song called The Golden State that became my favourite. I had never heard of John Doe but it turns out that he had an enormous acting career, the longest-running show of which was Roswell, which fit into my UFO-heavy early 2000s very well. I was still Paul Charles back then and not quite sure if aliens had arrived or not. Now I know they have not.

Roswell came at the end of the linear TV era when US studios thought a series was 20 or 25 episodes. Which means that although the show lasted only three years, there are no fewer than 61 episodes. That would be six or eight seasons now.

Anyway, nobody here knew who John Doe was but his song on True Blood was a duet with a similarly anonymous singer called Kathleen Edwards. I loved that song so much I began digging and I bought her third album, Asking for Flowers. She just had something special.

What that was is harder to describe. What Kitty had was a certain look at life that seemed very English. Full of wry humour, quiet humour, sarcasm and cynicism. The very title, Asking for Flowers, says a lot. What kind of a relationship is it when she has to ask him to buy her flowers? It calls to mind a more recent song, Gas Station Flowers, by Zandi Holup, another girl with an eye for the humour that can hide in despair.

The Cheapest Key is a musician’s song, in a way, but is just as accessible. It is also full of a certain kind of humour. It starts of with a simple ABC of how terrible her guy is. F is for... yes, you guessed it. But then comes a line that stuck with me.

Here comes my softer side
[WHOOSH!]
And there it goes...

The narrator is a hard woman, ballsy, strong. But she has her limits and this jerk is on the way out. It’s brilliant and remains my favourite on the whole album, closely followed by I Make The Dough.

This week, I played Sure As Shit while cooking and my wife asked if it was Joni Mitchell. Edwards can do any kind of song. I like the catchy-angry songs with some drums, but she does the girl-guitar acoustic thing brilliantly too.

A couple of years later, Edwards released her fourth studio album, Voyageur. What I had no way of knowing was this. Over in Nashville, a sixteen year-old singer-songwriter called Isabella Richardson was at the record store to buy Voyageur. Not Voyager, you understand, but Voyageur. The u makes it more French, more interesting, or maybe more Canadian. It might even mean something slightly different.

Voyageur was a bigger deal than Asking for Flowers. This was 2012, the year the Olympics came home to London and no lesser authority than the BBC wrote a review of Voyageur which you can read. It was the year she appeared on Letterman, and not for the first time.

It might not be an exagerration to say that Voyageur changed Issy Richardon’s life. She was the age my daughter is now, so I can imagine a little of her reaction. Back in those days, our teen days, music was the most important thing. We watched a lot of movies and TV shows but music was diffferent. Music was the only thing you could put on in your bedroom. Only the rich kids had bedroom TVs. Music was something you could control, independently of your parents, and with headphones they had no idea what you had on.

This is how important Kathleen Edwards was to the young Issy Richardson.

Oh myyyyy!! I first heard of her when I was 16 years old in Nashville, TN. Her album Voyageur is a masterpiece that I was undoubtedly striving to live up to as an artist ever since. It’s not only been in my top five albums but it’s linked to every moment in my life happy or sad (big moment or small). I always go back and listen to it when I want to feel like coming back to me. She somehow captures this essence that is indescribable. Lyrically and musically!

Fifteen years later, Voyageur is still in Issy’s top five albums and still her inspiration as a songwriter. Just think about that! I will ask what her other 4 albums are and come back to you. Issy also disclosed that she wants the song Sure As Shit to be played at her wedding.

As I came to learn this year, Isabella would leave Nashville for LA and begin what looked like being an enormous commercial music career until the pandemic sent her back home to Australia. That must hurt, at least a bit, but the end result of everything was that Issy ended up in Buckinghamshire near me. I know! Nashville, California, Australia... Buckinghamshire.

Had Isabella stayed in LA she would have had competition up the wazoo. It is very difficult to get noticed and to stay noticed in that town. But I can assert without fear of contradiction that she is the biggest star in the small town she lives in today. I cannot name the town in case that guy from First Aid Kit, her debut EP, catches up with her.

As I listen to Voyageur for the first time, I wonder whether Empty Threat spoke loudly to Isabella. It is about whether the singer, a Commonwealth expat, will move to America. When Isabella heard this, she had already made that leap, a leap that would not remain an empty threat for Edwards either.

I loved Billionaire, Edwards’ latest studio album, when it came out last year, but I was only streaming it at the time. This year I bought it on MP3, the year I kicked Spotify off my phone and plugged in my NAS hard drive with all those old CDs still on it. Such a device will cost you about $250 but will last fifteen or twenty years and you can still stream to your phone using Plex. It becomes an asset you can pass down, and when you reach my age, passing stuff down becomes more of a live issue.

I had the idea to write this piece when I saw Kitty’s viral reel about her frustrations with social media. A new friend of mine, Katrina Cain, with her angelic voice so pure that it caused the judges to spin around on The Voice, has been posting about the evils of social media as well. My generation will never understand why your generation thinks social media matters in any way.

Algorithms and the data behind them is my day job. The last thing I need at home is to be worrying about how many views my post got, and what % of them were men or were aged over 40. Nobody cares. It’s not that deep, guys.

Let me try to explain what is deep though.

For the best part of 20 years I have been buying and playing the music of Kathleen Edwards, and so has Isabella Richardson, even though we lived in different worlds at different times. This means, I am certain of it, that there are thousands upon thousands of men and women of all ages, all around the world, playing the music of Kathleen Edwards.

This won’t show up on any social media dashboard because many of the albums came out before streaming. My Kitty Edwards collection does not sit on a server owned by Daniel Ek in the Mojave Desert, destroying the cactus and drying out what little water there is or killing the lizards and killing the dreams of teenaged singer-songwriters. My music collection lives on a windowsill in my house. It has a little blue light to tell me it is working, and I can play the stuff on my phone and on my Sonos and in my car.

This is the real music business, and this is real music for real music fans. It is not often I finish a piece with a tear in my eye but I need Kathleen Edwards to read this, and to understand how important she remains to me and countless others she will never hear from.

You can catch up with all the Kathleen Edwards music here.

Stella is sometimes referred to as an old soul, which is a phrase the comes up a lot but is rarely this well-deserved. If you read to the end you can watch her perform For What It’s Worth (the Stephen Stills protest song from 1966 that is at least as relevant today) in a guitar factory. She loves the 1960s, she loves the guitar, and she loves Joni too.

This is what she said about her new single:

“I wanted to record my own version of For What It’s Worth because I truly believe it is the most timely song for 2026. It resonates not only with me, but everyone in my generation - Gen Z - as a wake up call to where we are in these wild times. It’s as relevant now as it was in 1966. And recording it in Laurel Canyon 60 years after its original release made it all the more full circle.”

Stella Prince often claims to have chosen a career in music at the age of only four, and first performed in public aged 5. I admire the focus and honesty. She’s not defensive about it, like a British person might be. It’s a simple fact. The difference between Stella and the rest of us is that she stuck to her goal, even through all the inevitable setbacks. I first wanted to be a writer around nine or ten but got totally fed up with the submission process in my twenties and started self-publishing, got a day job. Stella just motored through all of that doubt, and her determination is paying off. You can watch her chatting about her career on the video below, which starts with a live performance of For What It’s Worth.

One reason Stella wanted to do a Q&A with us is that she is coming back to London in August. She’s doing not one, not two, but three shows at the atmospheric Green Note in Camden. One of those is an afternoon slot if it’s a bit of a journey or, like me, you prefer to be in bed with the cocoa by ten. And if you prefer festivals, you can find her at the brilliant Long Road Festival in Lutterworth.

Stella answered so many questions in our rapid fire Q&A that I have split them into sections. Enjoy!

Q & A: Touring

Favourite thing about London/UK? Their incredible appreciation for music. Lainey Wilson always says she could sell out her UK tour years before she could do that in the US.

When were you last in the UK? In June 2025. I played Folk in the Garden in London.

Where else do you enjoy touring the most? I have done the classic Southwest run 3 times- and it’s my favorite. I’m doing it again this summer. San Diego to Seattle and back down. And I love Europe.

Q & A: Music

Lyrics or music first? Always music. Every melody has a personality.

How long have you been a pro musician? Since I was 4. I started voice lessons at 4, and performing publicly at 5.

Are you from a musical family? Not at all! I am the only musician in my family. But my parents are very creative (a painter and a writer).

When did you first decide to make a career/life in music? When I was 4 I knew this is what I had to do. I was just born with this. I wanted an agent, a manager, everything. At 4.

Favourite single so far? The Replay.

When is the album coming out? September 2026.

Do you find it easy to separate the music from the business side? In this day and age, no. As an independent artist, you have to handle so much of the business side yourself. A lot of my time is spent creating graphics, making travel plans, etc. It really goes hand in hand.

Q & A: Misc

Is Stella Prince your real name? Sure is! Born with it!

Star sign? Gemini.

Do you think you live up to it? I am a Gemini through and through.

Favourite thing about Laurel Canyon? It feels like a time capsule from the ‘60s.

Tell me about your small local business partnerships? Yes, I am so excited about this! I have partnered with 7 different local small businesses to do meetups and meet and greets on my summer tour.

As we mentioned, Stella is on her way to England! You can book all her worldwide tour stops here including Green Note, London and Long Road Festival, UK. You can watch her perform FWIW below, and there’s an interview at the end.

Lilly Winwood had become a fascinating musician for me. I had been drawn to her original songs by the cover she did of Higher Love with her dad. That was recorded years ago, when she was still at school, but I only heard it around December 2024.

Steve Winwood has been a constant presence in my life not only through that song, played everywhere on heavy rotation throughout the ‘80s, but through his song High Life, and especially when Warren Zevon covered it. It turns out that Steve Winwood could only write hit records beginning with the letters H and L. [Not true. ‘Back in the High Life Again’ is its full title. Ed.]

You can read a longer account of my year in music below.

Another early highlight of my year in music was discovering Lola Kirke, just a few weeks before her movie Sinners came out. I warmed to Lola for the same reasons I had warmed to Lilly.

Although Lilly grew up in England and sounds British, Lola was born in London and is the only one of the Kirke sisters to sound American. But with two British parents instead of one, Lola understood British humour and could do a pitch-perfect middle-aged English lady of the manor accent: her mother.

Better yet, both of Lola’s parents come from old English money and are descended from the aristocracy. I quickly began to associate the Kirke sisters with the Mitford sisters. I read Lola’s book, also then new out, Wild West Village. For a while, I might have been clinically obsessed. I met her on Thanksgiving in London and she signed my book. I believe the only way to experience her album Trailblazer in full colour is to read her book while you listen.

However the most surprising aspect of my reading and writing about those two is that it allowed me to follow the dots to other musicians. It was through Lilly that I met Cyrena Wages. Lola brought me into contact with Chloe Kimes, a singer so talented and tasteful that she recognised me in London. My brother has never forgotten that day. Lola also introduced me to Willow Avalon and… Katie Pearlman.

It was February 2026 when KP messaged me out of the blue. I don’t know why she chose that day or why she chose me, but I was surprised. My writing had focused on people at the beginning of their journey, people perhaps well-known in their local areas who had day jobs, or who were starting to tour nationally in America, possibly planning their first UK shows.

Katie Pearlman was not someone I expected to hear from. She has written songs for Sabrina Carpenter and Kelly Clarkson and I could not believe she wanted me to write about her upcoming album. The more I played her music, new and old, and the more I read her Substack and researched her life, the more admiration I felt.

KP’s bio is a line from the Edie Brickell classic What I Am and she identifies as Lilith Fair. I remember Lilith Fair first-hand, not through the thrilling Disney+ documentary. I am old enough to have seen Sheryl Crow play for just 400 people in Manchester.

Like Lola, Katie is Jewish. the -man suffix on a family name is a dead giveaway, like Dettmann. Many Jewish-German families ditched the duplicated N to make themselves look less German... really odd when you think about it too long. Improbably, and absolutely not amusingly, one of my ancestors was Hermann Dettmann.

The reason people sometimes ask me to write stuff for them is presumably the same reason Katie’s songs resonate across continents and across generations. I really do my homework, I dig deep, I look beyond the obvious, and certainly beyond the music. What fascinates me is a good story.

That story might be found in the lyrics, like in a good ole country narrative song like Goodbye Earl, another thing I remember from the first time around, before the Chicks were called the Chicks. A great story might be found in the backstory of the songwriter too, and the people who affect me the most deeply are when those two things happen at the same time. That’s what authenticity means to me.

The thing about Katie Pearlman, and Lola actually, and so many of the musicians I write about is that they don’t understand how great they are. All artists are affected by doubt and guilt and anxiety at some point, and some more often than others. The current phrase is imposter syndrome but it has existed for centuries.

If writing is a hobby, this frees you up from some of the fear of failure. Not all of it, but you know you’re not going to starve, even if they write reviews such as my favourite one-star review. Three words: not a book.

At some point in the early ‘00s I made a conscious decision that my writing career was not worth starving myself for. I had a job offer from a top London consultancy at the very moment in history when everyone wanted to be a management consultant and they even made a drama series out of it, House of Lies with Don Cheadle.

I travelled the world and saw the Record Plant, Sausalito, where they recorded Rumours, on expenses. It was the right decision for me, but it inevitably stalled out my writing. Anyway, most male writers are over forty when they first get a novel published. What do you know about life at 21, really?

So I know some of what it means to be a professional artist. Imagine how much more deeply the fear of failure would strike if you depended on your music to eat! This is why I love writing about pro indie musicians. It’s their balls. They live a life I bottled out of.

Over the last few months, listening to Katie Pearlman’s new music, and trying to figure out how I will write about it when the time comes, I have been very severely struck by the range of emotions and styles she manages to cover. I started to realise a while ago that most pro artists can sing in virtually any style. Yes, they all choose one style for their own albums, and generally try to stay in a lane that makes sense to their audience. But quietly, behind the scenes, they can all sing any genre you can imagine.

I admired Katie because she might write for famous people who are essentially pop stars, but in fact she canned her own pop album after it had been recorded. This needs to be dwelt upon.

I have chucked books and many other projects for the same reason, because I lost faith in the output. Sometimes I have released a book that I lost belief in just to get it off my mind. Recording an album involves a fuckload more money than writing a book and it involves lots more people. Not only the musicians but the producer, the mixer, the candlestick maker. Katie had to find the resolve to tell her whole tribe that this album was going in the bin because she could no longer connect with it emotionally. I am shaking my head with awe as I write this. The sheer balls!

What I can tell you is that KP’s new music, her full-length debut album in fact, will not be going in any bin. I am sure she is slightly more excited to share it with you than I am, being so late to the party. Sometimes, though, a latecomer falls hardest of all. But I fully endorse this message and strongly recommend that you play some Katie Pearlman this very moment. If you don’t, your friends will, and you’ll be a step behind the curve yet again. Don’t be that person. Tell your friends: the album of 2026 is this one.

You can listen to Katie Pearlman’s music in all the usual places. You can dig a little deeper here and I strongly recommend her Substack, below. As you might expect she is on Instagram and TikTok.

hi it's me katie.

writing. thinking. music. musings. magic.

By Katie Pearlman

I was vaguely aware of the format but did not realise it was modelled on a successful night in Nashville that has run weekly for years. An all-female line-up sings one song each in succession, and then at the end they all sing a female-written cover song as a group. This group chose Dry Spell by Kacey Musgraves and had a lot of fun singing the yups! Never has a yup sounded more Yorkshire.

One of the best things about these showcases is getting to discover new artists, and of the four below I was previously aware only of Issy Richardson. All of the artists impressed me and they were all so different. It looked to us like all the girls had become fast friends, especially for that group song at the end.

Vic Allen

One of the best things about this format is that the singers have time to talk about the context and inspirations behind each song. Inevitably, most of the songs were about the different ways men can disappoint women. Present company excepted, obvs… Anyway, Vic Allen anchored the show and introduced the format. She has played here several times before and helped everyone relax into proceedings.

Vic played us Falling in Love, her new song out on 26 June which you can presave here. She told us it was really about falling for London again after she returned before Christmas from a spell in Nashville. Is there anywhere better than London at Christmas? She also sang Brighter, and one written when she realised that she tended to write a song about every single relationship in her life called Ended in a Song.

I really enjoyed Suitcase, written during lockdown and a celebration of her love of travel. Vic is currently based in London so I hope to see her play live again as she gears up for her album release later this year. You can still support her crowdfunder here.

Mabes

Essex-based Mabes introduced her first song, Too Young to Love, about her first long-term relationship. A really moving tribute to a relationship that began when both were teenagers and became challenging as they grew into adults, and grew apart. Her song Danny was written in character about a war hero, an idea inspired by her love of Laura Marling. She also played Slow Drowning and America, a song inspired by a writing camp in Nashville. Mabes has an upcoming single you can presave here called Ready To Go.

Fascinatingly for me, as a writer, is that Mabes was drawn to poetry before music and picked up a guitar as a way to share her words. If teenagers are still finding poetry relevant then there is still hope!

Marianne Leigh

Marianne is originally from New Zealand, about as far as anyone can travel, and it was certainly worth the journey. She brought a lot of fun and energy with her and I really enjoyed her quirky take on the key moments of her life so far. She sang clone, her new single due out on Friday 12th June which you can presave here. Memory is a little hazy on some of the song titles but I think she also sang Good Man, Who Says Exes Can’t Be Friends and Crazy Love.

There’s a growing catalogue of Marianne’s music for you to stream but one that stood out to me was the phrase shouted in my earhole every Yorkshire evening of my childhood: shut up and eat your dinner. Where I’m from, dinner happens at lunchtime.

Isabella Richardson

One reason I chose this particular Sunday to visit Lil Nashville was to watch Issy Richardson play. I had been reviewing her recent EP, The Waiting Room, and decided these songs had to be seen live.

Just before Isabella sang her first song, a pint of Guinness arrived. The look on her face was that of a parched desert traveller who has misplaced their Stanley cup and started wondering about the mechanics of drinking piss. I wrote down: Not Guinness Zero. It turns out that Guinness is the perfect liquid to lubricate vocal chords! No, I didn’t buy it either.

Issy was just as funny and friendly as I expected, and you can read my thoughts in detail below.

You can find out more here about Vic Allen, Mabes, Marianne Leigh and Isabella Richardson and stream all of them in all the usual places! They are all very much worth following. Do try to see one of them near you.

When we heard Meredith Brooks was coming to town, we all grabbed a ticket. She was the biggest new star of 1997 with her album, Blurring the Edges. Nobody had ever heard of her and I did not know until today that it was her second album. In our eyes, and in my ears, Meredith Brooks had only one song and it is called Bitch.

The bitches are back. The wonderful Kassi Ashton just released a much calmer, very different country song called Bitches. She had all the same issues that Meredith Brooks faced. Is that progress? Why in America is the word bitch enough to get you banned from the radio? Brooks’ record company, Interscope, had grown tired of her songs when songwriter Shelley Peiken watched her sing one night.

Shelley Peiken: “[Meredith] was introduced to me by her manager and I went to see her play at a club in Hollywood. I thought she had balls. I thought she could really sing. But I didn’t know what to write with her. Then I had this really miserable day and I started writing a song with the line, ‘I hate the world today.’ I thought, Oh my God, I’m gonna call that girl Meredith because she needed a song to bring to Interscope.”

As you might have guessed, Interscope were horrified. Meredith jumped back in her car and drove over to Capitol Records. They signed her that day and Bitch became a No. 2 around the world and No. 6 here. Although it never quite topped the charts, we never forgot Bitch, our generation. Somewhere else in England sat a teenaged Nat Hills, no doubt responding even more viscerally to this song because, like Meredith and Shelley, she was a girl who wanted a music career.

I hate the world today
You’re so good to me, I know, but I can’t change
Tried to tell you but you look at me like maybe
I’m an angel underneath
Innocent and sweet

Yes, it’s punchy from the off. Not only has it not dated, it has become even more relevant. When our girls wrote Bitch, they were frustrated with the 1997 music industry, as it was then, with Napster just bubbling up. Imagine what they would write today!

I’m a bitch, I’m a lover
I’m a child, I’m a mother
I’m a sinner, I’m a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I’m your Hell, I’m your dream
I’m nothing in between
You know you wouldn’t want it any other way

Who is she singing to? A man, yes, but who is he to her? There are moments when he is the boyfriend but there are moments when he could be any man, or even The Man. There are moments when he is Jimmy Iovine, the founder of Interscope Records, a man loved and loathed by female singers throughout the decades, not least by Stevie Nicks.

Nat’s version of Bitch is authentic and close to the original without trying to copy it. Meredith Brooks was almost forty when she sang this song, but the anger is that of a woman at the end of her rope. This was her final chance, and she felt it, and it garnered three Grammy nominations in 1998. MB had finally made it, and she was now middle-aged.

In this new version, Nat’s voice is a shade deeper yet just as angry. This Bitch is full of ‘90s music production and the video is a must-see. Filmed on a Ring doorbell (other doorbell cams are available) it has that earthy, grainy quality that we all remember from the MTV era and VHS.

Bitch is a song from a time when kids taped stuff of the radio and we taped Top of the Pops. Meredith Brooks, against all the odds, became the Killer Queen of 1997. A few months before I saw her live, MB hit TOTP herself. I shiver still to watch the footage. She was and remains a real rocker.

Nat Hills is a real rocker too, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know her this summer. Her EP says it all and is available now: Therapy In Session is a brilliant title with so many meanings, and a handful of bangers. She works hard on her own material but is also in-demand with her Miley and Cher tribute acts.

As you can see from the artwork below, Nat’s 2026 edition looks like you just found it in the loft, covered in cobwebs and untouched since 1997. That CD logo, that Parental Advisory sticker, those scuffed edges. It even has a dance mix and radio edit versions. She’s partying like it’s 1999 and it’s time to stream the new Bitch today!

You catch Nat Hills in person this year all over the country including at Isle of Wight Festival when she is one of the very first acts on their all-new country music stage, Last Chance Saloon.

Cyrena loves an exclamation mark and so do horror movies. I watched The Bride! this week, by coincidence. Cyrena has played a bride before in photo shoots but finally the day arrived when she literally transformed herself, throughout a day of being the bride, into a wife, that most civilised yet puzzling of creatures.

I have seen a few reels from the big day. She wore her mother’s dress. She won’t mind me accusing her of using this whole process to get more songwriting material. I know this because I’ve seen her using the backdrop of the wedding to shoot another music video. It’s more of a fact than an accusation.

I’ve been listening to today’s number, Wildflower, for over a year and it still grows. This one is different yet familiar. Cyrena told us in an interview last year that this one had a special place in her heart.

I wrote “Wildflower” about the woman everyone warns you about, who is also the woman everyone wants. It explores the tension between rebellion and intimacy, the space between a midlife crisis and a genuine ache for love. I’ve always found dark romance to be the most evocative romance, and the "opposites attract" dynamic of my personal life has made its way into most of my writing, with wit, cynicism, and playfulness as tools to handle vulnerability.

So this is not a narrative story like If It Ain’t Broke or Find Out (FAAFO), or anything you care to choose from 2024’s debut album, Vanity Project. This is a first person song in which the singer goes to sleep as a rose and wakes up a wildflower.

The thing about the wildflower, in spite of its name, is that it remains a very delicate, precarious plant. A rose lives on a sturdy bush. A wildflower is cast to the winds as a seed, hoping to get lodged in some grass, its life short even if it germinates. I think we can expect more gardening songs in the future. They’re en vogue at the moment, to wit: Willow Avalon’s hilarious Hypothetically Speaking.

This is as close as Cyrena Wages or C$ gets to bopping. It feels slower but also light and airy, despite the dark romance of the lyrics. She refers to daisies and weeds too. The only question I have is: how much of the song is about Cyrena herself? She says she wrote it about ‘the woman’ everyone warns you about… but who is that?

The good news for you is that Cyrena has lost none of her edge or anger, despite being the happiest she has ever been. I used to fear that if she settled down and became a home-maker, or a trad wife, perish the thought, the music might stop. In fact she is only just getting going, and proudly holds on to that sharp dark edge.

You can stream Wildflower in all the usual places and find out more on her website. You can presave Miss Melancholia! here.

Oh we’re fighting again
About the same old thing
It’s a crying shame
But I’ll take the blame

The most literal hearing of these lyrics might suggest a narrow interpretation of love. The duo have been talking about this as a queer anthem, a celebration of gay love, and all of that is true. But I had to ask: isn’t it really about all kinds of love?

ALI: The initial intention was to write a song about romantic love but the way it evolved, it became something where it can apply to any relationship that’s loving like friendship, romantic, platonic, familial, all of it. But I think with specific lyrics, we were kind of drawing from our own past relationships and the dynamics of being with a person that brings you back to your best self and helps you to regulate yourself and remind yourself of your own worth and how that’s more valuable than any tangible idea of wealth.

RAE: That’s where a song like Real Wealth for me is like a medicine or a tincture because I think the hardest thing about self-starting everything and self-financing your dreams is that you can lose yourself and you can reach a point of desperation. It’s the relationships in your life, the good relationships that feel warm, that can regulate you to keep going. I think that’s what I was channeling in the song.

ALI: I think as artists we need a lot of validation, but I was thinking about the root of what that really means in terms of applause or numbers or, you know, whether it’s a playlist or selling out a venue or having fans and all of that stuff. The validation... it all kind of roots down to connection at the end of the day, the desire to connect and be relational with other people.

I was aware that both Ali and Rae had played at the same SoCal Sound all-female showcase a few weeks before we spoke. What I didn’t realise is that they were invited separately and SoCal Sound did not know they knew each other and did not know about the duet. Rae explained that the duet dynamic is quite different to working more in isolation.

RAE: I think it is an amalgamation. I’ve been hesitant to even label it as like, oh, it’s this, because I think what sticks out to me most is the way that our voices work together. They blend really well when they need to, but they also cut through like the way her voice is so Ali and I feel like my voice is so me.

You pick me up when I’m feeling down
I miss your touch when you’re not around
Oh in sickness or in health
We found love’s the real wealth

The timing of this song is part of their joint and separate narratives. Ali is still promoting her debut album, which I reviewed earlier this year.

Meanwhile Rae is preparing for the release of her next album, which even I do not know the title of. Or the release date for, but it will very likely be this year. So for both artists, Real Wealth acts as a bookend, a pause.

I reminded Rae of a point she made on tour: that although the musician lifestyle might appear precarious, from her perspective the ‘safe’ office job is looking less stable all the time. She completely, and very rationally, deconstructed the narrative we were all given from birth, that the way to happiness is to work really hard at a boring job and then retire as early as you can.

RAE: That idea sounds very unsensible to me. And not because I’m wild! I think what’s sensible is depth and autonomy. To think that you put the things you actually value which are your passions, your adventure... to put that off until the end of your life makes absolutely no sense. Real Wealth is about the pursuit of what’s really valuable in life despite the timelines we’re supposed to follow.

And that is why I love Rae Isla. She is one of the most steady, grounded people I have spoken to in the last year. A quick chat with her makes it sound like the musical life is sensible and authentic and not at all risky. She makes me think I can follow the path too. If she can, if I can... then surely you can.

Our conversation moved on to the difference between writing as a solo artist, which Rae and Ali do most of the time, and writing as a duo.

ALI: It’s interesting when two artists write together it’s like there are a million choices you could make that take you in different directions in a song. When you’re writing with somebody else you could be steering one way and then they’re like “well, what if we did this” and then suddenly the song becomes something it would never have been if you were writing alone. I think that’s probably what you’re hearing in the song, too, is just like the twists and turns of like... I navigated the song this way for a bit. And then this choice Rae brought, and back and forth. And so it becomes this kind of combo of our styles because, just like the way our brains work, we have different ideas.

All artists are independent up to a point. If it’s your name on the cover, you have to answer for it, even if you’re signed to a major label. But when you’re really independent, the stakes are even higher. One of the aims of a duet must surely be to unite your audiences, to share ears, and hopefully reach new fans.

Ali and Rae have achieved that and more with Real Wealth. It is both more Ali and more Rae than their solo work, recognisable but different. The same, but better.

Crying all around the room I make a mess I can’t get through
I don’t know just what I’d do without you
And if we lost all it on red I would bet on us again
Cause we are one in a million

In many ways, Rae and Ali seemed just as surprised as I was to find themselves recording together.

RAE: For two artists to come together and to be able to take it across the finish line just feels like lightning in a bottle. So I’m really excited about this because I’ve had so many writing sessions that just fell off or we didn’t cut the record... for one Real Wealth there’s a hundred ones that didn’t make it.

Needless to say, they just kept on talking, and I hope to bring you more of their thoughts soon. But for now, clap your ears around Real Wealth today!

You can catch Ali Angel at all kinds of venues around LA and further afield and you can read more on her own site. She has a funny TikTok account and she shares posts on Instagram regularly. All of her recent music is available direct on Bandcamp.

Rae Isla is also active on social media, especially TikTok and Instagram, and you can sign up to receive her emails on her site. You can buy her music on Bandcamp or stream in all the usual places. A new album will be with you shortly.

This week’s single, It Ain’t Me, is a tub-thumping, foot-stompin’ honky tonk hit. It’s fast and loud and great for a line dance with some 90s-style production on top. It’s been in my ears for weeks now and is rapidly becoming my favourite PKJ track of them all.

It might be considered incongruous to share some family news alongside the release of a song about such a loser, but that’s the way the universe works sometimes.

I was lucky enough to meet not only Paige but her husband Griffin in London, and shortly after their fourth wedding anniversary last month, they announced that Paige is expecting her first baby this fall!

“I’ve never felt a deeper calling over my life than being a mom, and one of the most attractive things I noticed about my husband, Griffin, early on when we were dating, was how patient and loving he was towards all the children we had around us, from friends to family. I knew he would not only make a great husband, but a great family leader and father to our children someday. I’m excited to become a mother myself and fulfill that long-awaited call in my heart, but I’m even more comforted knowing that I will be doing it alongside such a great partner. We can’t wait to welcome our sweetest answered prayer this fall! Thank you, Jesus, for trusting us with this blessing. Baby C, we are so lucky to be your parents, and we can’t wait to kiss your sweet face!”

There’s only so much excitement I can share in a single article and I thought it was important to let Paige announce such enormous news in her own words.

Moving back to the single, it’s really funny in spite of the topic. Yes, he’s a loser, of course, but he is such a giant loser that it’s properly amusing. He drinks too much, leaves her to pick up the tab, and then treats her like an Uber afterwards.

Paige has shared some of her inspirations and insights into the making of this song. The big surprise for me was that such an upbeat tempo song, even if it deals with some challenging topics, was written alongside the heartbreaking earlier single, I Get Old Too.

“We wrote It Ain’t Me on the same day as I Get Old Too. After finishing such a heartfelt song, we wanted something to lighten the mood a little bit. This song really fell out in no time at all – we just had fun & leaned into early days of Carrie & Miranda vibes when writing it. It’s full of all the sass that, I believe, female anthems should have as far as the writing goes, but we went full on 90’s honky-tonk with the production when we took it into the studio.”

“Finding out that your person hasn’t been as faithful as they claimed to be is not fun, I’ve been there, but being able to really call them out on their stuff & have the last word in the breakup is the redeeming part. That’s what this song is all about!”

Paige King Johnson is a Belmont-trained songwriter with a home base in Nashville and North Carolina. You can follow her on Instagram, TikTok and read more on her own website.

Things have changed in 2026. She’s still brilliant, but Hand Me Downs was nostalgic and deeply felt. As you can read below, it does not always refer to physical objects. Hand Me Downs was a cry for help in a world where we retain the baggage of our ancestors, try as they might to lessen the blows of life.

This is Zoee’s account of how this song got going:

I started writing this song in the wee hours of the morning… it must have been around 4am, which is either very late or very early, depending on whether you’re an insomniac or a songwriter. Or both… I am both. It’s that magical hour when the rest of the world is asleep and your feelings have absolutely no supervision.

What she came out with is the darkest and least optimisitic song she has ever written.That is why today’s single, Don’t Let Me Go, is even more powerful.

4 AM slippin’ in my DMs
Wasn’t long before I was in your bed
From hey what’s up to midnights and all your weekends
Now you’re runnin’ circles through my head

There’s an anger under the surface. She remains disappointed and profoundly so. It is easy to see why this guy fell for her, but impossible to understand why he treated her so badly. This is the moment when the positivity falters. Even Zoee sometimes finds it hard. Hope is a choice, in the end, and it might be considered disingenuous to see every setback as an opportunity. Sometimes you have to be sad.

Now I’m staring at my phone when the night ends
You love to leave me hanging on by a thread
You went from calling me your best friend
To ghosting me like I was dead

Part of this song’s impact comes from the element of surprise. I didn’t see it coming, even coming hot on the heels of Hand Me Downs. Perhaps even more so because Zoee has dealt with setbacks before, and therefore you know it takes a lot to knock her off kilter, this one hits hard.

You never called but I got the message
I can see it all so crystal clear
Now you’re standing here in all of your wreckage
Begging me to take you back, my dear

I didn’t see the twist coming. There isn’t any more of this cinematic story yet, so I have no idea whether she took him back. I know what we want her to do, what she should have done... but did she?

Postscript

I wrote this before Zoee published her own account on her own Substack. I knew that I had a fairly strong understanding of the song but I did miss something important. I had interpreted it as a misguided relationship, a mistake that Zoee probably saw coming but disregarded the signals. As I listen more, I tend to think this is more like an abusive relationship. There is something cold and calculating and cruel about the guy’s behaviour. Yes, this is very different.

You can pre-save all of Zoee’s music here. If you’re in Nashville for CMA Fest, go see her at the Bluebird Café on June 5th, and at Ariat on Broadway on June 7th. All show dates are at zoeemusic.com. It’s going to be a special one.

Zoee’s Substack

this song is about someone I should have never trusted

I started writing this song in the wee hours of the morning… it must have been around 4am, which is either very late or very early, depending on whether you’re an insomniac or a songwriter. Or both… I am both. It’s that magical hour when the rest of the world is asleep and your feelings have absolutely no supervision…

Read more

2 months ago · 2 likes · Zoee

As I was diligently listening to these albums on repeat, week after week, I became aware of an influence that I suspect many Gen Z listeners are not as familiar with as Brit Gen Xers. To call Garbage an American band is laughably simplistic. To recall just how enormous they were in the 1990s is to smile. Their flame-haired lead singer, Scot Shirley Manson, very much reminds me of KC. The Garbage comparison covers both of today’s songs and also others such as unfollow me.

Garbage peddled misery all day long in hits such as Only Happy When It Rains and Stupid Girl. They contributed a Bond movie theme. To infer that Shirley Manson might be stupid is a mortal sin. This was an outfit that knew who they were, they knew their fans, and they knew that boppiness might sell a few records but would be disingenous at best, and most likley dishonest. Both of the songs under review here hark back to that 90s Garbage heyday. Let’s listen!

everything’s a mess

My first experience of this song was after the Camden show. It wasn’t part of the set so I put it on full blast in the car. A nice gentle song to end a memorable evening. Kitty seems younger here, or at least more naive than the battle-hardened witch in Conversations with the Moon. This song appears on HELLCAT but feels older somehow. It is very simple, too, a reminder that song lyrics are not poems. Songs like this are more about feelings and enhancing the music than philosophizing.

I never learned to trust the things you tell me
When you lie I wanna kill somebody
I know you’ve never really been sorry
But you could’ve faked it like me
Doing all this shit for my attention
Go and find a girl who wants to listen

There is so much hidden away in the lyrics at the beginning. Her extreme reaction to the other person’s lies... contemplating murder... suggest the lies are regular. Even their apologies were hollow. The singer’s response, rather than to kill, is to hide away in bed. Life just seems simpler on your own.

Everything’s a mess, so I just lay in bed ‘cause
By now I have figured out it’s just better
To go alone when you take the last train home
If he wanted to he would, so just forget him

This is when she gets angry. The simmering is done, and rage takes over. She is screaming at full volume, outside in the night, screaming to... the moon?

So don’t call me
I don’t want you
And don’t text me
I don’t wanna talk
I can’t be what you need
So won’t you just fuck off?

It builds beautifully. Where you end up is not where you thought you were going when things started. In that respect, it is very much like the drugs don’t work.

the drugs don’t work

I heard this one live in London at a time when I didn’t know Kitty and was not as familiar with her music. I pair this with everything’s a mess because in many ways it is also two songs in one.

Arriving near the end of a live set, it is a moment of reflection and contemplation. A very quiet song indeed, one presumes. It showcases KC’s voice, the tender side of her personality, and is accompanied only by a simple acoustic guitar with a few swoops from a pedal steel. It’s nice enough, but is missing anger. The theme of not wanting to go out and socialise mirrors the lying in bed of everything’s a mess.

I don’t wanna go out
I don’t wanna drink
I don’t wanna roll one
But I don’t wanna think
I went to the doctor
She asked me where it hurts
I said, “Well it’s hard to tell
But these drugs don’t work”

This is the moment when you start to realise how wrong you were. After a couple of minutes, the volume increases, as does the tempo. The acoustic guitar is suddenly building into something quite violent. Then those drums! Here comes the anger! The record is loud but in real life this is a very loud song indeed. Then there’s some rave-style whistling or shrieking. You need to turn it up to hear that well.

Made me a crown of blue bonnets
Called me the queen of Texas
I knew it was a lie
But it felt so nice
If there was a pill to forget
I’d pop it twice as fast
‘Cause it’s a hard thing to swallow
That nothing good lasts, oh
Nothing good lasts, oh

If only for the contrast between the two halves of this song, it has since become one of my favourites on Conversations with the Moon, and one of my favourite KC songs of them all. Both songs hint at depression and mental illness as well as rage and fury. Listened to side by side they tell a compelling story.

You can start here to begin your Kitty Coen enchantment. Her Insta is here and the videos are here. Join her mailing list here.

It helped slightly when I realised Issy lives in the same home county as yours truly, but only a little. I challenge you to spend half an hour on the phone with her and not end the call friends for life, quietly adding her to your list of “when phoned at 4am to request help burying a body, just say yes” friends.

One of the many reasons that I immediately decided to download Isabella’s EP was that she is so self-effacing, apparently unaware of her effect on others. The artwork for the EP is vaguely autumnal and very British. Hard though it may be to fathom, she seems to prefer our decidedly meh climate to all the sunshine she grew up with.

Even better than all this, if improvement could be imagined, a cursory listen to the four songs gathered together as First Aid Kit reveals that every song features an explicit lyric. That is one of my favourite things about Australians, men and women both. They swear almost as often as me.

Waiting Room

We are only four words into the EP when we experience our first fuck. Yes, the F-word is the literal fourth word. She’s really angry. I discovered that these four songs were written in quick succession, very close together, and they are mainly about the same ill-fated relationship.

I guess I fucked myself over with the last laugh
Cause I′ve been thinking bout you since and how I want you back
Heavy on the lump in my throat, a tough pill to swallow
That I thought of you as forever, but to you I was borrowed

We are not in the dentist’s or doctor’s waiting room here. At this season of her life, Isabella is feeling second best every time, at best. She is always someone else’s Plan B. This is very difficult for me to imagine. Could it just be that she’s drawn to that guy, the wrong ‘un? I sense she would not really be happy with a doctor, dentist or accountant. She wants danger. Artists of all kinds crave it. Just not this much.

Body Count

This is the song that made me feel angry. I cannot be sure if the song refers to a single event, a series of events or a whole relationship. Isabella leaves just enough unsaid to introduce some doubt that adds to the mystery.

She seems at her darkest moment here. Something happened on her birthday, but it was not only that. There was a lot else that was dark. Just how dark, just what he did, is deliberately unclear. But this is a very good song indeed.

I′m not one to hold a grudge
I’m six feet deep in the hole you′ve dug
What you did on my birthday
I’ll never live down
And I feel like a fucking fool for trying to get you to hear me out

It would be easy to walk away from a first listen to this EP feeling despondent. Anger is the over-riding emotion, at first listen. There is a lot else going on too, in particular a feeling that she might have lost this battle but is still very much in charge.

Runner Up

This song does what it says. It considers the unlikely scenario in which Issy is a runner up to a love rival. It seems that this is not unfamiliar territory. It has happened so often that she starts to question herself. If she is always second best to someone else, could it be her fault?

Go cry baby
Go figure it ain’t me
Maybe I’m just hard to love
That’s why I’m never good enough
But I don’t want if, buts, or maybes
Is that too high of a shelf to reach?
Cause I know I’m not that hard to love
I’m just sick of always placing Runner Up

I’m afraid this is the kind of thing that can happen when you choose to hang around too long with men. They look a lot of fun from a distance but once you commit, they tend to... run a mile. This one dumped her after a twenty minute phone call. One wonders why it took him twenty minutes. Was he working up the courage? Making sure he was sure? Trying to suss her out, just in case there was any chance she was about to dump him first?

First Aid Kit

The title track arrives last. This is the moment when I look backwards and wonder if I have a favourite. The good news is that these songs are all very similar stylistically and are best interpreted as four parts of the same story. This one opens with Issy stuck on a ferris wheel at a carnival. She’s going round in circles, never making progress. She is the other woman now, dating a man known to have a steady girlfriend. Could this be love? Do we need to ask?

I’m stuck on the merry go round at the fun fair
Reminding myself I′m a good person I just slipped up there
Cause I keep falling for these boys who show up like a man
Promising what ifs and future plans

It makes me think that this might be the first in the timeline... that he was still with someone else when they first met, but making empty promises about the long term. She’s feeling the pressure from other friends, most of which are now coupled up and raising babies. Does this make someone lower their standards? That is the stereotype, certainly.

A Massive Future

If you get chance it is worth going off piste and finding some of Issy’s other songs on your streaming service. She had a big success with her song, Galaxies, which appeared in a Disney Plus movie. Pin up Girls and Paper Crowns are also very strong.

The good news is that Isabella Richardson is highly self-aware. Whenever she is being gulled by a shark, we at least know that hindsight kicks in right away. She can always see the danger ahead, she always knows the outcome, even as she closes her eyes and dreams of an unexpected surprise.

It would be easy to say that this guy had trouble written right through him from the start, like Brighton rock. Less easy to admit that it was therefore all a total mistake. There must have been some highlights. And if there were not, at least she got this absolutely brilliant debut EP out of him. And even better, when he hears about it, he will know exactly whom it is all about.

Isabella Richardson is on Instagram and TikTok as well as on your favourite streaming service.

Before we dig in I want to try and explain one of the key motifs in many of these videos, especially the later ones. I can tell you hand on heart that Kitty is one of the most charming and self-effacing musicians around. When she recognised me in Camden and turned on the charm, I was spellbound. I managed to stagger out into the spring night unaided, weak-kneed, but it was an effort. Let’s say she has an aura. So when you see the character in these videos with a glasslike blank stare, it is artifice. She is acting. It is an effect used by David Lynch and earlier than that in film noir. When she is crying or screaming, silently, it is jarring and makes you feel uneasy. It is not an easy thing to do as an actor, and it is very deliberately done.

Era: Disco Lemonade

The songs on Kitty Coen’s Disco Lemonade EP were released around five years ago. These videos are less stylised than 2026 Kitty and feel a little like high school TV episodes rather than the spooky motion pictures she makes today. She probably isn’t aware of the classics we watched like Grange Hill and Waterloo Road. What is striking in the videos (as in these songs) is just how polished they are, given that it represents the artist’s first major selection of songs. She emerges almost fully formed.

Era: ✰HELLCAT✰

Kitty isn’t drinking lemonade any more. She’s a year or two older and starting to leave the high school locker room drama firmly behind her, most likely permanently. There is an increased confidence in many of the videos. They are more cinematic, by which I mean both bigger in concept and darker emotionally and stylistically.

Everything’s A Mess resonated with me. I had it on in the car at full blast and the anger felt very real. The video starts with a lonely Kitty in headphones lighting up a ciggy in a graveyard. Most of the video happens under the enormous neon sign of a liquor store sometime in the 1950s. My favourite part is when she finally snaps and starts head-banging to the loudest solo of the song. This is when the anger boils over. Before that point, she appears on the verge of tears. You probably want to save her, to fix her, but be warned. She’s self-contained. She really doesn’t want you to call. It’s a brilliant one-woman show that turned out to be a great starting point.

Take Rotten Tomatoes. It starts off with Kitty singing against a blue background. Then she’s lying in a field, then she’s in a car. She’s happy sometimes, dancing at other times. It’s just a normal music video. Until. Until those tomatoes begin to fly. There is something profoundly disturbing at her lack of reaction to the fruits being hurled in her direction. You might know that they are heavier than they look. She’s metaphorically in the stocks of medieval times and barely registering any emotion. This is the beginning of a visual transformation that she takes forward with each new cycle.

In unfollow me we find ourselves in classic high school politics. Her character is a bookish nerd, presumably highly intelligent but someone who often finds themselves the butt of the joke, easily ignored. As the song unfolds, she gradually transforms into after-hours Kitty, an eye-catching bombshell who is suddenly popular. It’s a story that appeals to every generation but the “ugly duckling” make-over is nicely done.

Era: Conversations with the Moon

conversations with the moon, the title track, is a lyric video, just as simple as Everything’s A Mess, starting off in a graveyard with Kitty in a simple white dress. The enormous flower in her hair cannot convince us she is happy. This is one of the videos that set me on the road of interpreting her videos as Lynchian shorts. Her facial expression is so blank, even while she reels off the saddest and most emotional lyrics of the whole album. This dichotomy or contradiction between how she looks and what she is saying is pure David Lynch. It makes the viewer uneasy, uncomfortable. She’s really not okay. Finally, a minute from the end, she snaps, and we see the anger expressed on her face. It’s really nicely done. Then she’s blanking us again.

coca!ne jacket is one of my favourites. It looks like a fun night out in Nashville. It’s a heavier, louder song, which I really enjoyed live. And it guest stars local legend Leilani Kilgore on guitar! What more could you want?

virginia is for lovers is too powerful and tragic to dissect here. You just have to watch it. I will try to write about it next time but it’s both dark and voyeuristic, and also ghostly and deeply moving. I enjoyed watching these videos and can feel a follow-up piece coming later this summer.

Q&A, pt. 2

If you would like to read part 1 first, see here. We’re stoked that Kitty found the time to think about these questions and write about her inspirations and journey.

How long have you been a pro musician?
Long enough to know there’s nothing romantic about it unless you make it that way. I’ve been doing this seriously for years, but sometimes it feel like a life sentence because I really can’t seem to care about any other work the same way.

Lyrics or music first?
Usually a feeling first. Then a line shows up like it’s been waiting for me, and the music kind of builds a world around it.

Are you from a musical family?
Not really, but my parents were big music listeners and made sure I knew what bands played what songs. Many road trips from Texas to my grandparents’ farm in Missouri with a game my dad coined “name that band”. But no instruments in the house and my singing always sort of got in their nerves. My parents worked non-stop from 4am to 10pm everyday with hour-long commutes to and from the city back to our house in Denton, TX. So they were always tired by the time they got home and I was hell in a hand basket as a child so they did their best and I love them for that. They see now it wasn’t just a phase!

When did you first decide to make a career/life in music?
It was in New Orleans, LA at Niki music festival. I was working as a photographer for the fest but I remember wanting nothing more than to be on stage. After the show I roamed the city and listened to all the live music at the different blues and jazz bars. And I just knew. To be honest it didn’t feel like a decision. It felt like the only option that didn’t make me disappear into someone who I wasn’t.

Which is your favourite song off the new album and why?
My favorite is conversations with the moon 😄 it was one of those songs that just came out so quickly and it always knew exactly what it wanted to be. I admire that. Not all songs are like that. Some are more contrived than others. I also know I’m not the only one that’s been a headcase talking to the moon. Feels good to not feel alone in this world.

You can start here to begin your Kitty Coen enchantment. Her Insta is here and the videos are here. Join her mailing list here.

According to this week’s song from Katrina Cain, I should have thought more of my hometown, instead of ditching it at the earliest chance. The singer of No Hometown feels rudderless in a state so enormous (over twice the size of Britain) that you can barely drive it in a day.

I didn’t know any of this when I saw Katrina in London. What I saw and heard was amazing. You can read all about that below, but all I saw was a brilliant singer-songwriter who was lucky enough to be able to tour with her patient husband, a man I would later see in a clip from her timeless blind audition on The Voice, footage from nearly ten years ago.

Any Fleetwood Mac fan who has seen her version of Rhiannon could not forget it, and of course the judges turned around when she hit that note. And before we move away from covers, you simply must catch her singing Dancing in the Dark, a song I played on repeat when I first lived alone in London.

One thing I know is that teenage Paul, pounding the streets of his hometown, first on foot, then on bike, then in a classic powder blue Mini Cooper GT owned by his friend, could not have imagined a world in which someone like Katrina Cain, Queen of Austin, would ask him to listen to her new song.

I don’t got a hometown
No place I can hang around
I keep rolling out the map
I’m here and then I’m back
In motion

I’m sitting next to Paul Heaton, a more famous Paul who settled in my hometown, in a pub that no longer exists. Behind me is a guy I don’t know called Roland. A few years from now he will start a band called Fine Young Cannibals. Somewhere over there, playing near the fire, is a little girl called Hannah. I don’t know her, but she will star in a Marvel movie thirty years in the future.

Port cities in England used to be the centre of the the universe. Not necessarily for nice reasons, you could hop on a boat sailing west from Liverpool to America, or from Hull you could head to Sweden or Holland. Dover was best for France in a world without aeroplanes. Because it is such an otherwise out of the way place, the literal end of the land, I felt my hometown to be a burden, a weight to be shifted. I did not know any of those people in the next road who would have amazing careers in showbusiness. I resented my hometown and wanted rid of it, and left at the first opportunity. So did they, of course. Only Philip Larkin performed the reverse journey.

Katrina Cain is a determined, tough pocket rocket who has weathered all the storms she has faced. She’s an old soul, of course, recently posting about how disillusioned she has become with modern technology, not least social media and music streaming. I am listening to No Hometown alongside her EP, Gold, in MP3, actually downloaded to a device. And I am writing this on a travel keyboard that looks like something from the 1980s but does exactly what I need and nothing more. It captures text. That’s it.

The song itself, which you can listen to from today, is fun and jaunty, with a little of the glissando I remember from that night in London. She references Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde, a couple I have written about at length elsewhere. They were always a doomed, tragic couple. But Bonnie without Clyde? I always think of the outlaw as being an exciting figure but here she is not.

Now I don’t know how to answer when they ask where I come from
Oh it’s like I’m just an outlaw, Bonnie Parker on the run

If it helps, I always thought the Texas cap fitted. I’ve recently been writing about Kitty Coen, another KC from Texas, and there’s something fabulous in the air, or the water. Or the oil.

Katrina knows the land well, born in Dallas, even though her family were not living there at the time. That raises questions I do not have answers for. I watched her interview on Austin Downbeat when she appeared with Johnny Goudie and she appeared as she always does: calm, assured, confident. She sang one of my favourites, New Mercedes, and Johnny looked seriously impressed.

What this experience has reminded me is that creative types rarely feel truly at home anywhere. Katrina is wrong about not having a hometown. Even if she had one, she would not feel all that settled. She has music and therefore travel in her bones: an incurable, life-long condition. There is nothing more exciting in this world than waking up in a new place at dawn, especially when you have no memory of how you got there. This is a wonderful single... give it a listen this minute!

Katrina Cain has her own website and is slightly reluctantly available on Instagram and TikTok. My personal preference is always the email list.