Melbourne alternative folk artist Kathleen Mary Lee knows how to translate heartbreak into music. Her delicate, ’60s-folk reminiscent sound is awash with bitter-sweet tones, and new single ‘Broken’ charters that very territory.
“I kind of like being broken,” Lee tells Music Feeds about the central sentiment of the song. “Although it is a more difficult feeling, longing for something can be a more beautiful feeling, a more piercing feeling than the nice feeling of contentment. However the very feeling itself is a feeling of discontent – so it is like desiring the undesirable. A lot of my songs are about this same sentiment.”
‘Broken’ will feature on the follow-up to Lee’s debut EP release last year, Nice Kind of Pain, and will see the young artist experimenting with a new technique – backwards guitar. “I was mucking around with reversing some of my nylon string recordings and really liked the ethereal, haunting sound it made, especially when mingled with the warm mellow sounds of the regular forwards recordings,” she explains.
“I love experimenting with the physics of sound for nerdy kind of reasons but I really began to like the aesthetic of this as well. I started making some demo’s with backwards guitar creeping in and out and pretty soon I was set on doing a whole EP with this as a theme, starting with this song, ‘Broken’.”
For the track’s video, Lee (who is also a filmmaker) employed a similar technique, the clip featuring her playing the song in four parts, each filmed at different speeds and in different orders. “I wanted to record and film a video of the song at the same time and in a way that you could see all four of me: one normal, one in slow motion, one backwards and one backwards at double speed,” she explains.
Watch the visual feast here.
