Love Letter To A Record: Kim Churchill On Ben Howard’s ‘Noonday Dream’

May 4, 2019

Many of us can link a certain album to pivotal moments in our lives. Whether it’s the first record you bought with your own money, the chord you first learnt to play on guitar, the song that soundtracked your first kiss, the album that got you those awkward and painful pubescent years or the one that set off light bulbs in your brain and inspired you to take a big leap of faith into the unknown – music is often the catalyst for change in our lives and can even help shape who we become.

In this series, Music Feeds asks artists to reflect on their relationship with music and share with us stories about the effect music has had on their lives.

Kim Churchill – Ben Howard, Noonday Dream

This album came out several months before one of the most momentous periods of change I have had in my life. I was forced to grow, understand and experience loss in devastating new ways. I learnt that as we go through life, there is an inevitable element of suffering and pain. It’s part of life. It’s a given. Coming to that realisation was important to me, as I was then able to accept it and surrender to the immediate things that were happening.

I learnt that, deep inside these times of pain, the most profound and rare opportunities for growth are offered. Whilst I was in my hardest moments last year, I found important forms of therapy within music, both creating it, and experiencing other people’s. Noonday Dream became almost a meditation for me.

I would wander the streets and coast line of Newcastle listening to it back to front again and again and again. I felt like my entire love of music was channelled into an intense desire to be within just this record.

Ben finds ways of describing his own pain and struggles in a melancholy but ultimately proactive way. He needs to sing those lyrics and words to get through. The creation of them is a therapy for him. I felt this and the album really gave me the strength to focus on my own growth and to try and channel my own shit as honestly and beautifully as he was. It unlocked a new doorway in my songwriting and helped me understand how to cut straight to the heart of a song and its meaning.

I think this album’s like a massage for the over-worked minds of emotionally vulnerable people in this world. A chance to realise others feel the same thing. And, others are gripping onto the reigns of those feelings and riding them through to greener and more beautiful places.

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Kim Churchill’s new EP ‘I AM’, the first instalment of a cross-continental four EP project, is out now. It’s a mesmerisingly lovely and sonically eclectic collection of acoustic-laced poetry, and every breath Kim draws will whisk you away on a breeze of dreamy wanderlust. Catch him touring ‘I AM’ across Australia this June (dates below).