Kate Bollinger / Lael Neale
Kate Bollinger
Image courtesy of the artist
Lael Neale
Image courtesy of the artist
Kate Bollinger’s songs tend to linger well beyond their run times, filling the negative space of ordinary days with charming melodies and smart phrasings.
She writes them at home in Richmond, Virginia, letting her subconscious lead, an open-ended process she likens to dreaming. From a chord progression appears a line, maybe a syllable will start to stick enough to pursue; but, she says, sometimes the words don’t feel like her own, more like shapes that form in the mind’s sky. While many are personal and deal with the emotions that surface with finding her place in the world, she’d prefer they be whatever you’d like them to be, to connect with listeners in their own way. Bollinger’s musical universe is relaxed, tender, and unassuming; within lives a timeless sensibility, a songwriter’s knack for noticing the little things and their counterpoints. Darkness and light, pain and pleasure, reality and escape—these all have space to be seen on her new EP, Look at It in the Light, her first project on Ghostly International, arriving in spring 2022.
It is the simple thing that is so hard to do. This is the paradox that musician Lael Neale has lived within throughout her development as an artist. It is the reason she became enthralled with poetry. Poems are a distillation. Lael says, “this challenge to winnow away what is unessential is the most maddening and, ultimately, rewarding part of writing a song.”