Tenderness’s debut is a sweet blend of the musical and emotional themes of love and loss.
Tenderness is the nom de scene for the solo project of Katy Beth Young, formerly and maybe currently of Peggy Sue and Deep Throat Choir. True is her debut album. True came about through a convergence of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Young began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. “I was having a hard old time, but it was also strangely beautiful,” she says. “There’s something about that space of grief that is very tender. There was a lot of sadness, but also a sweetness and openness to the world. You feel things deeply, but you’re also gentle with people.”
In the late summer of 2020, Young got together with producer Euan Hinshelwood in Greenwich and cut 8 demos of the songs that form the spine of True. Over the intervening years, Young developed the songs and brought in friends and colleagues, including Harry Bohay on pedal steel plus Hinshelwood, who plays on every song, deploying synths, drones, backing vocals, bass, percussion and guitar. Longtime collaborators appear throughout: Peggy Sue’s Clay Slade and Olly Joyce, La Luz’s Marian Li-Pino, and members of Deep Throat Choir. Backing vocals are provided by Martha Rose, Dandy Deniz and Benjamin Gregory, while finishing touches, strings and synths were added by producer Chloe Kraemer.
Although a collaborative effort, True is very much Young’s record. The themes are the circumstances that gave rise to its creation, while the finished article bears witness to the perspective granted by the years since the songs were created.
The album opens with Saturday Morning, which slides in on a shimmer from the keys and pedal steel. The lyric sees Young reflecting on a relationship ending, “time is wasted on us” and “I’ve started making plans to replace you with one perfect song that goes on and on”. It is followed by Salt Flats, a more up-tempo song with a light soul feel, remembering a day out and repeating the metaphor of morning good, evening bad of Saturday Morning.
The title track starts optimistically as Young declares “I wanna show you my love again”, but as the song develops, she comes to realise the futility as “he turns me into a memory/ before I’m even out of the room“. Touchscreen feels like a country-style song with Bohay’s pedal steel and Hinshelwood’s guitar prominent, although the theme: life and love digitalised, is modern. The title of We’ll Always Have Paris 1919, the side 1 closer, nods to both Casablanca and John Cale; the song itself is more of a riff on the squeezebox of relationships flipping from almost marriage to distrust and back.
Turning the record over, a soft bass, courtesy of Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, and pedal steel, take us into Peacetime, which, with its sense of impending doom and embrace of connection through technology, suggests the early days of the lockdown phase of the pandemic while recognising the stresses of distance in relationships. Database Blues returns to the tech theme and how the algorithms accumulate in a way which make breaks with the past harder; Young adding “Our modern love is just the same as everyone’s.”
The next track, Day of Atonement, starts with a more ominous tone and the feel of an old folk ballad. Young’s fragile vocal touches on a sense of loss, and the synths and pedal steel provide a warmth to comfort her. The penultimate song, Heat Wave Love Song, with its reference to “two shower days in the capital”, will resonate with urban dwellers. The love song part nods again to long-distance relationships and their capacity to disappoint, with so much invested in the moments together.
The album’s final track is Playing ‘Country Roads’ and is the most stripped-back song on True, weighing Young’s delight at songs untainted by being shared with her ex with the disappointment of never being able to play them for her late father. Her love of music and its place at the heart of her life runs through the song. It’s a message many here will empathise with. And will also get the final couplet “But it’s been three months since the funeral, and all I want to do is play ‘country roads'”. It’s an emotional end to a very personal record.
As an album of songs depicting a time and places, or times and places, in Young’s life, True is a bit like a photo album, albeit with 3D entries. For those who have experienced the loss of loves and loved ones, it resonates deeply as sometimes only music can.
