Bonnie Kemplay offers a pastoral respite from life’s hectic pace on ‘Big Machine’
After several years away, Bonnie Kemplay has returned with another lilting slice of folk pop enchantment.
Licking her wounds after an injury forced Kemplay to put down the guitar for rehabilitation; such time away forced the Scottish-born artist to take stock of life’s dizzying pace.
Like a passenger in one’s own daydream, repeatedly watching life passing by, such a disquieting upend that came with recovery and a big move to bad old London inspired the new single ‘Big Machine’.
There’s certainly a slow-motion traverse captured on ‘Big Machine’. Hiding behind hushed production and rippling ambience, Kemplay’s nimble acoustic picking travels a quiet road of contemplation far beyond her mid-20s.
“I like storytelling and trying to capture a feeling or a moment,” Kemplay has stated on ‘Big Machine’. “It’s about being swept into a new life, running on autopilot, and the helplessness and overwhelm of watching the world unravel on your phone.”
It’s a sentiment that hovers in the collective air with knowing ubiquity nicely bottled in Kemplay’s lyrical reverie.
Such understated confessionals gleam the brighter with her knack for extracting a pertinent nugget from an innocuous line: “I live in a big machine / Feels like forever in a dream.”
Ain’t that the truth?
Kemplay doesn’t pull ‘Big Machine’ anywhere dramatic or exceptionally ornate, neither does she complicate her simple, reflective themes with much ambiguous lyricism, but she simply dwells in a pastoral realm that offers a warm, soothing respite for the soul just when it feels like we all need a little respite in our busy, hectic lives.
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