Always Here
Performed by Kit Green
Written by Kathryn Williams & Kit Green
Produced by Ed Harcourt
Always Here is sung by a gender non-conforming protagonist. They are our contemporary, but in each of the eight tracks they also exist in a distinct time-period that isn’t now. The production and song styles reflect that, but there is a unity to the whole song cycle that adds up to a picture of who the singer is. And who we are as listeners.
The singer is made from their trancestors, the queer people who came before them throughout time, and also those stretching into the infinite future. The title, Always Here, reflects the fact that living beyond the binary is as ancient as human existence. It’s only Western Imperialist Cultures that have insisted on male and female. And really – how many of us does that serve?
But the album is much broader than that. Every human being has to let go of the past and embrace the future every second of life. It’s a constant cycle of pain and gain. We are all made up of past, present and future, and finding the joy in that is finding the joy – and intense pain – of existence.
Always Here invites you to dance, strut, sway, sing along and perhaps shed a tear in an innovative exploration of how to live.
Track Breakdown
Always Here
There’s nothing new about living in a different gender, it’s as ancient as life. This song celebrates that, whilst painfully touching into the way our lives have been erased from history, but we remain eternal. This is musically a visit to Nashville in the 90s.
Lazy Ice Cream Sundae
New York in the 70s is the perfect place to explore sex and desire. After all, a lot more people like Ice Cream than will admit it. Wink emoji.
In This Moment (I’m Enough)
Ibiza EDM in the 00s for this self-empowerment banger. No person is an island, and we need to work out how we fit into the world from other’s approval/disapproval, but ultimately it’s our own approval we need. This song asks, why not celebrate that on the dancefloor?
Chanson Pour Moi
A 1920’s Parisian chanson mashed up with an 80s power ballad. It’s about what has to be left behind in order to find peace, joy, or something new. Unless we make space, can anything beautiful come to fill it?
Am I What I Am?
This Berlin Cabaret theatrical song asks questions about how useful the idea of identity is. Are we constrained by the labels others give us – or even the ones we give ourselves? We are infinitely more than that. Life is, for all of us, a sublime act of self-creation. If we are brave enough.
Old Soul
Many trans people identify with this idea that they were forced to be sensible and grown up as children, to mitigate against their queerness. So do many other people who were forced to grow up too soon. This timeless contemporary folk song pushes back against that. We were not old souls, we were children.
Future Now
Meet us on the futuristic dancefloor.
“Breathe in the past. Exhale the future”
Living gloriously in the moment balanced between the two.
Reel Life
The song cycle ends with a heady whiff of Hollywood in the 1950s. The lushness of the interior sung monologue, where everything is in vivid colour and rich harmony, ends with solo voice and piano captured on a Voice Note. So all of that expansive wide-screen living is carried into everyday life.
Photography by Sorcha Bridge
Supported by Arts Council England