New language for the old feeling: How Katie Gregson-MacLeod refreshed the love song
One time in a conversation with a friend, we mused a woozy kind of question: “Are all songs love songs?”
Please, think right now. Try to find a single artist who hasn’t delivered one. Heartbreak songs are love songs too. Angry, vengeful, raging songs are love songs too, just about soured love. Protest songs are love songs for a better world. Even instrumental tracks are love songs, sometimes in intention but always in the amount of effort poured into them. It’s been done. It’s been done literally forever. But still, the love song rejuvenates and respawns, sometimes into tired old repeats and sometimes into something truly special. Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s new EP is something truly special.
It’s the opening track that got me. Just after midnight, brushing my teeth before bed, I thought, why not, let’s stick it on. I loved the singles. The tenderness of ‘Mosh Pit’ with the gorgeous conflict between its rowdier images and simple, soft, domestic heart. The wondering on ‘James’ and the way the storytelling lyrics found a way to somehow make the timeless begging question of “how will I know if it’s the real thing?” feel like a brand new hypothesis.
That’s the thing. There is something here that feels new and at just gone midnight, hearing the title track, ‘Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early’, I paused mid-brush like I’d witnessed a new scientific breakthrough, like she’d just figured out the recipe for an emotional atom bomb, like some new planet of poetic phrasing just got spotted; and all of it lies in simplicity and specificity, a language that’s only her’s.
The proof is throughout. To articulate the giddy joy of a new love settling into a sense of normality, with some foot in thrill and the other in peace, she sings, “Skipping down Green Lanes / You stole a glass again / From the pub we play chess in / They’ll never let us back in / We’re criminals and boring / And we’ll never need more than this.” Rolling between the straight up and the slippery, it’s gorgeously fresh in its endeavour to say something timesless.
On ‘Mosh Pit’, she sings of a desire to be fully brought into someone’s life, to be accepted by them, to have their loved ones love her. It’s the sort of stuff a big grand ballad would be written about. She simply talks about pastry and pesto, says, “Hoping that this lunch will buy / My spot in the family line.”
It’s the title track where the full atomic power lies, though. Typically, love is written of as this big, vast, inspirational force. That’s what love songs have taught us: if an artist is loved enough, they will pick up their pen and transmute it into something. We see love songs as a kind of medal pinned on a relationship that can now be dubbed a great love, worthy of writing into art or at least so powerful that the artist cannot resist.
Gregson-MacLeod goes the other way, singing of a love so beautiful and powerful that it threatens to make her quit the rest, that this love is not only so peaceful she has no tumult to put down in song, singing “I don’t have much to say now / I’m not sad enough.” But it’s also a love so beautiful and so simple that it defies the need for productivity in an almost anti-capitalist ode to adoration, singing, “Changing what my mouth and my hands are good for / Holding up your head is their only task.”
It feels so luxuriously new the way she articulates these grand feelings with a dedication to smallness and simplicity, holding the same vast sentiments that have forever coloured love songs, but putting them into mornings in the kitchen or walks down the high street or a desire to get off the stage and go home. But there’s also a place for these songs in a lineage, reminiscent of ‘Our House’ but exactly the version where Joni Mitchell, the song’s muse, giggles away in the background, grounding it in a reality, making the simplicity of the song and its honesty audible.
The art of the love song is a forever thing. If every song is a love song, it means that we’re now billions and billions and billions deep, with more added to the pile each second. How do you say something new that will shake the crowd off? How do you say something strong enough to hold such a complex and universal feeling? No one really knows. It’s as up to chance as a stumbled across a breakthrough, but Katie Gregson-MacLeod got the code.
