Born from a personal tragedy, an album which seeks to not just explore grief, but also inspire healing in its wake.
When it came to composing for her new album In The Low Light, British singer-songwriter Lucy Kitchen’s songs first started life as small poems, a simple way to capture her thoughts and mood during a very difficult time: her husband’s battle with cancer and, tragically, his eventual death. With such a heavy shadow hanging over it, perhaps the most surprising thing about the album is that it’s not all darkness and depression; in fact, there is a brightness of hope there too that reflects the mending Kitchen found through the creative process.
The album opener, Winter King, is hauntingly bleak as Kitchen, her voice fragile and airy, expresses yearning using some fantastic, dark, imagery: “Would you come to me on ravens wings / With feathers of snow / Blood of berries upon your lips / Eyes aflame and your heart aglow.” Blue Light too looks grimly at life after loss, Kitchen’s vocals with an ethereal edge as she sings how “everything’s changed” now that the one she loves has “gone into the blue light”. The acoustic In My Corner has a sweeter, but still melancholic feel as she mourns the loss of her biggest supporter, yet she hopes to make them proud and vow to keep on chasing her dreams in their memory, continuing to forge on through “the dirt and the dust”.
While some songs may dance around the sorrow, the truest traditional folk song The Boatman finds Kitchen hoping for death so she can “see [her] love again”, but it’s The Ways We Were that pulls the fewest of punches when it comes to grieving. Sparse in arrangement, just Kitchen’s vocals along with Jon Thorne on double bass, it’s a raw and honest account of not wanting time to move without the one you love as she longs to “pull [herself] back” or them “forward somehow” so she “won’t forget”. “Wish that I could dream / Of better times,” she admits on Milk and Honey as she struggles to accept her new reality, while on the soft, countrified Red Skies she wants to “Drink the wine, get giddy” in an effort to forget the one she can’t get off of her mind.
The delicate Chemo Song is, as the title suggests, a stark retelling of her husband’s time undergoing the titular cancer treatment: “My love is sleeping / He dreams the days away / Lost in dreamland / While I while the time away.” On the other side of things, there’s September’s Come where Kitchen vows to reclaim her favourite month that has been sadly marred by the passing of her husband, but it’s the jazz-tinged Sunny Days that is the most bright and hopeful song on the album, where we find her discovering a new hope and happiness, rejoicing that she “thought that grey was here to stay” but she has “found a rainbow to colour [her] way”.
The story running through In The Low Light has a very personal origin to Kitchen, but it’s easy to listen to it with our own ears and relate the songs to the endings and passings that everyone will experience through in their own lives. But just as the album takes us on a journey through the darkness of loss, it also helps us remember how to live again in the light because, as the old saying goes, it’s always darkest before the dawn.
