The two legendary rock acts that inspire Sarah Kinsley: “Biggest vocal inspiration”
As music lovers, we’re used to experiences that feel temporary. However, in Sarah Kinsley’s latest EP, Fleeting, therein lies the beauty of art itself – feeling “deeply and truly”, even if it’s not forever.
Across Fleeting, Kinsley does well to remind us that there is no big, major sweeping statement about life or love itself – rather, the beauty comes from collections of moments and experiences, all of which make you feel more alive knowing that they exist to pass you by. In ‘Lonely Touch’, for instance, she captures the spirit of “true intimacy” through the lens of Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, like a flash where connection feels like its own living, breathing thing.
Perhaps that’s why ending the EP on ‘Fleeting’ was the perfect choice, as it captured Kinsley’s point about experiencing all the different facets of life and all its highs before eventually coming back down to earth again. Order of tracklisting is one of the most important parts of any record, and with ‘Fleeting’, Kinsley focuses on the balance between swirling in the chaos and the exhale that comes after.
In terms of influences, Kinsley has always been endeared to anything she feels an emotional connection to. Whether Guadagnino’s romance or Ugo Bienvenu’s animated fantasy Arco, it doesn’t always matter the exact shape or form of the art so long as it captures her heart. The same goes for music – it doesn’t matter the genre or style; if it’s good, it’s good.
For Kinsley, a lot of writing the EP was soundtracked by the kinds of material you probably won’t expect, but that’s precisely what makes it even more interesting. Instead of searching for similar-sounding peers and channelling them, Kinsley embraced anything that made her think or feel, even if it meant discovering golden oldies she previously hadn’t given much thought to before.
A lot of the time, Kinsley was listening to the sounds of The Blue Nile, New Order and Cocteau Twins – the latter of which contains her “biggest vocal inspiration”, Elisabeth Fraser, while New Order let her in on a small tidbit of musical history she’d never heard before.
As she explained to Far Out, “Elizabeth Fraser will always, always be my biggest vocal inspiration. I was listening to New Order, and I learned that New Order and Joy Division are the same… I didn’t really know that, so I had a summer listening to that on almost a scholarly level. It’s so dreamy.”
Although distinctive in their own ways, many of the same themes can be detected through Kinsley’s material, especially the more personal experiences that can be interpreted in various ways from the perspective of the listener. This is precisely the message through Fleeting, and its ambiguity makes it an even more enriching experience with the broader themes of love and yearning.
New Order, too, often tackles that dark, gritty type of euphoria that you feel through some of Kinsley’s songs, especially when looking at how those moments are often compounded by both sides of the spectrum: dark and light.
