Katherine Priddy has produced a deeply beautiful record with 'The Pendulum Swing' (released on 16 February 2024). It's richly layered, dramatically poetic, and packed with personal touches certainly, but broad enough to hit home with all of us who listen, too.
Katherine has spoken of how she was in a different place - at a different life stage - when she put this album together, as compared with her debut LP ('The Eternal Rocks Beneath'). That record was exquisite, pure and very special, one of my top 10 of 2021. It's now been about two-and-a-half years since that album was released. It came at a time when the world was filled with uncertainty, at a dark point of Covid, and much more. The world has moved on - there are plenty of new and terrible problems now, but at least we've turned a corner from the pandemic. And Katherine herself has, naturally, moved on, too: she and her music have matured; she's left home, travelled, lived in different places, mainly with and thanks to her music.
I interviewed her for Nottingham's LeftLion magazine recently, and asked her about the time when she wrote the album.
"For me it was in a chapter when I was moving home and moving out, and working out what I wanted to do … it was that kind of push and pull," she explained.
"With the first album, most of the songs were written when I was a teenager and at Uni - so I’d like to think that these songs have matured. I’d like to think my song-writing generally has matured, and I think thematically it has as well," she continued. "I’m definitely in a different place now, and I think the songs reflect that."
They definitely do reflect that.
Over the past months and years, Katherine has imparted her music to more people and broadened her fan base significantly. She's appeared at major festivals, toured internationally and played live on national radio stations including BBC Radio 2 and 6Music. Something of those new facets of experience - drops of emotion and memory - seem to have found their way into this new, matured collection, and sit alongside elements of her past, weaving into her personal history. This brings a distinct feeling of wanting to move forward, but also looking back fondly and nostalgically, finding comfort in elements of life that might have been taken for granted previously.
"I’m now trying to work out where I want to put down roots and what home means to me," Katherine told me during our conversation in early February. "Now that I’m doing more music as well, I think that comes into the album in terms of it’s a very unsettled life to choose in some ways, so again that comes into the whole craving comfort and home and stability, but also being in a position where I’ve chosen a career which doesn’t really seem to allow that very much!"
Katherine's feeing is that this overarching concept of the 'push and pull' of life fits well with the idea of a second album, too.
"It was me wanting to do something new but wanting to consolidate the first album at the same time - and thinking about how much to lean away from it. The title ‘The Pendulum Swing’ is taken from a line from the song ‘The First House On The Left’, which was the first single from the album. That song is about my childhood home. That kind of felt like the cornerstone for the album."
I told Katherine that when I heard the phrase “the pendulum swing”, my first thought was of the passage of time. She agreed that there is something of that on the record.
"There’s a lot of nostalgia on the album and songs of my family. The song for my dad ‘Father Of Two’ actually has a cassette recording of me when I was two-and-half, I think, talking to my dad. There’s definitely some nostalgia in there, but I think for me the pendulum swing is more about the constant leaving and returning and trying to break that cycle."
As Katherine touched on there, the album contains - much more than in her previous work - little snippets and samples and elements of incidental sound. There's a failed telephone call, sounds of a tape deck, little clicks and creaks which are difficult to place. This reveals a noticeable evolution of style; another component of the maturing we spoke about.
"Again, with the theme of home, I kind of wanted the album ... not to feel exactly like a house, but to feel like something you can go in and inhabit, and to have those familiar sounds and to feel lived in," she went on. "With ‘The First House On The Left’ being about my house, instead of using normal percussion, I wanted to use the sound of clockwork and creaking floorboards and stuff. That’s the rhythm of day-to-day life and that’s the sort of thing I wanted to try to capture. Throughout the album I wanted to get those familiar little sounds and little creaks. I’ve always enjoyed those slightly strange little noises that pop out of tracks sometimes - they don’t jump out exactly but … It adds to the whole atmosphere, that cinematic kind of style."
I suggest that, perhaps, home is meaning something a bit different to her these days.
"Yes, I think so ... and I’m trying to work out what it does mean to me."
The album opens with a ethereal sound-piece, packed with those snippets of memories laid over reflective instrumentation; this melds into a brand new song, 'Selah' (a Hebrew word with an unclear meaning, but often interpreted to impart the idea of 'forever', and a blessing). This is a classic Katherine Priddy ballad - soft and lulling in many ways; lyrically clever and attractive; and based around a deft and nimble finger-picked guitar sequence. But the record then moves through a noticeably eclectic range of styles. There's a section, for example, which develops the more Americana-influenced sounds we've heard on her recent single releases; as well as some broader, folk-anchored songs. Look out for my full review soon.
The Pendulum Swing: Full track list
1. Returning
2. Selah
3. First House On The Left
4. These Words Of Mine
5. Does She Hold You Like I Did
6. Northern Sunrise
7. A Boat On The River
8. Father Of Two
9. Anyway, Always
10. Walnut Shell
11. Ready To Go
12. Leaving
All songs were written by Katherine Priddy, except 'Ready to Go' which was co-written with George Boomsma.