Sarah Kinsley is back in her spiritual home with new EP ‘Fleeting’
After a round of technical difficulties at the start of our virtual chat, Sarah Kinsley tells me that time speeds up as you get older. “It would explain why the months feel kind of like weeks or days, sometimes,” she reflects. “Anyways, that’s kind of in the spirit of the EP, which is just about time constantly moving and having no sort of chance to stop.”
The clue is in the title – Fleeting – a collection of songs that feel like “portals to other places” where you can escape to or find tranquillity, even if those places become mirrors to confront your own experiences, before it all dissolves away. This, in essence, is what makes Kinsley’s latest EP so emotionally resonant: the joy of feeling “deeply and truly”, even if everything is temporary. Even if it’s all fleeting.
This message begins with the beautiful ‘Lonely Touch’, expanding on the earlier expressive synth-leaning flourishes of her debut, Escaper, and inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s romance Queer, in which Kinsley traces the lines of “true intimacy”. And just like these flashes of moments that pass you by, the shorter EP length gives credence to the things we cherish and enjoy, even if they’re over before we’re ready.
“I feel very comfortable with an EP,” says Kinsley. “Albums are kind of daunting for me. EPs are kind of like my home, my natural territory. I feel like you get this perfect hourglass shape of inviting someone into a world, getting as close to you as possible, and then expanding again, which is how I’ve always thought about them.”
The biggest challenge was moving in a slightly different direction, both artistically to better reflect who Kinsley is now and sonically to expand on the emotion-filled palette she established in her previous work. What emerged during the process – a hands-on one that included “throwing so much stuff at the wall” and “experimenting more” – was a challenge that opened Kinsley’s eyes to the different strands of representing who she is as an artist.
“It’s much more synth-heavy than the rest of my music,” she says. “But the challenge was definitely trying to thread this conceptual understanding while allowing the songs to sound different. I think about songs like ‘Truth of Pursuit’ and ‘After All’, they’re on completely different sides of the spectrum. But they’re both equally representative of who I am and who I would like to be musically. So that was a very, like, exciting challenge for me.”
Navigating this during the creative process also means that choosing just one that best captures who Kinsley is now is almost impossible to answer, but in the end, she lands on two that sit at neither end of the spectrum: ‘Lonely Touch’ or ‘Reverie’, because they seem they could be just a little less fleeting than their peers and still speak for her “at least for the next year or two”.
Despite the broader theme centring on time moving quickly and appreciating emotions and moments while they’re there, Kinsley also explains that it’s important to allow the listener to take what they need from the songs, and provide spaces where differing perspectives can shape the underlying theme that everything is temporary.
“I always struggle to prescribe to people what I want the message to be,” she says. “I’m a very avid believer in you take what you’re meant to take. And I think this time, [the lyrics] are so clear that there’s no sort of hidden meaning, which I like [because] I’ve always been very ambiguous in my writing. And this time, I just wanted to be so clear that it was almost a silly thing to have double meaning or anything like that.”
“There’s a lot about yearning,” she continues. “The EP ended up being a lot more about love, and reckoning with love, than I actually intended. And I don’t know exactly how that happened, because it wasn’t an intentional choice, but I think it was a huge part of what was happening in my life as I was writing this body of work, and it’s kind of impossible to separate what I was literally thinking about in my personal life and experiencing from what I was writing.”
Many of the songs also reflect the kaleidoscopic nature of life, and how, in this “tumultuous journey” where there’s “desire and pursuit and longing”, there’s also a type of infatuation that can fester with you and make you feel the darker notes, too, like pain and chaos.
“All that sort of wildness and thrill and the lows do even out, and time erodes all of the chaos of what I have gone through and what people go through,” says Kinsley. “I don’t necessarily want to tell people everything’s gonna be fine, but I do think that all moments are temporary.”
Much of this journey is also reflected in the EP’s order of tracklisting – something that Kinsley tells me is entirely intentional – and how the record resonates the way that it does because the songs play out in a specific order. In Kinsley’s view, it would be an entirely different record if the tracklisting were jumbled any other way, and the fact that it starts with ‘Lonely Touch’ and ends with ‘Fleeting’ really drives the point home.
“The intention was to kind of hope that the listener gets a bit closer to me with the balance, and the darker underbelly of what it means to have beautiful, incredible highs,” explains Kinsley. “And how you eventually do come back down to earth in many ways. Ending it with ‘Fleeting’ is definitely the message I want to finish on.”
In terms of textual or cultural touchpoints, Kinsley, of course, refers to the impact that Queer had on the EP, and, although it didn’t inform the writing process, she also mentioned her love for Ugo Bienvenu’s animated fantasy Arco. During the creative process, she listened to a lot of British and Scottish music, including one of her all-time favourites, Cocteau Twins, as well as The Blue Nile and New Order.
“Elizabeth Fraser will always, always be my biggest vocal inspiration,” she says. “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 completely distinctive, those throughlines can be detected throughout Fleeting, capturing the essence of dreamlike wonder and passing moments that make you feel differently or see the world in a new light. Kinsley explains that she loves film scores that move her in ways that are hard to describe, altering her mindset in ways that might not always inform her own writing process, but which open her heart and mind to new stories and experiences.
Those open-hearted strokes are precisely what make Fleeting anything but its namesake – a constant friend to return to, when you feel like you need to stop and enjoy the chaos, when time feels like it’s moving far too fast.
