
Katherine Priddy’s new single ‘Daybreaker‘ can be safely claimed as literate – it is, after all, her second collaboration with Simon Armitage, the Poet Laureate. It is a setting of a winter themed poem, this time looking to Winter’s end – the thaw after the freeze, the light at the end of winter’s tunnel, that day when it feels like sunlight is in the blood. These can equally well be taken as metaphors for emotional states, in fact we’d bet a Canadian Dollar that that is what they are.
But above all of the high falutin respect for the literary, what we have here is a beautiful song sung beautifully with Katherine Priddy giving just the right level of emotional depth to the song, it could sink into maudlin, it could be edged to a full blown bombastic conclusion. It does neither of these things because Katherine Priddy is too fine a singer – the depths of sadness are explored only so far, the redeeming phoenix spirit of life is embraced, there’s a sunrise glow to the end of the song, which has the good grace to not forget about those months of melancholy. It’s a beautiful thing.