A soundtrack for love: Sarah Kinsley’s Valentine’s Day soundtrack
“You’re so in love, you could vomit,” Sarah Kinsley sings on one of her latest tracks, ‘Lonely Touch’. “How to say what I want / Is to talk, but not talk / Is to feel without hands / How to love and never land.”
In her latest EP, Fleeting, Kinsley navigates the intimacy of love, romance, and falling into all of life’s fleeting emotions and memories. In Kinsley’s own words, these four gorgeous tracks provide “a promise to yearn, to long, to feel deeply and truly, despite knowing everything is fleeting”.
Starting with ‘Lonely Touch’, a song inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s Queer, Kinsley captures the joy of feeling “deeply and truly” throughout Fleeting, navigating the beauty of romance even at its darkest, even as it flickers by, unnoticeable unless you’re really there in its fires, embracing it all while knowing that eventually, it’ll pass.
“There’s a lot about yearning,” the singer recently told Far Out, adding that this collection is more about “reckoning with love” than she intended. “And I don’t know exactly how that happened, because it wasn’t an intentional choice,” she said. “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.”
In music, love can manifest in different ways, and in Kinsley’s latest material, it rarely takes on one shape or form, instead appearing in different portals to other places, from desire and pursuit to yearning and chaos, each moment compounded by how wonderfully brief it all can seem, no matter how profound or poignant it feels. Sometimes, it’s because of their temporary nature that moments feel all the more intense, and that’s precisely why we should live more in the now.
As Kinsley explains, “All that sort of wildness and thrill and the lows even out, and time erodes all of the chaos of what I have gone through and what people go through.”
“I don’t necessarily want to tell people everything’s gonna be fine, but I do think that all moments are temporary.”
Sarah Kinsley
Lots of love can be found in Fleeting, but Kinsley also finds these throughlines elsewhere, some of which she has provided in a playlist exclusively for Far Out. While creating Fleeting, Kinsley was listening to a lot of Scottish and British music, which is why it’s no surprise that the first song in the collection is The Blue Nile’s ‘A Walk Across Rooftops’, a song that reminds her of the romanticism in her own heart. “When I listen to them, I find myself loving love,” explains Kinsley. “This is a song to walk around and romanticise to.”
Next up is one of the most romantic hearts and minds that ever existed: Leonard Cohen. On ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’, Kinsley highlighted her favourite lyric: “As a falling leaf may rest / A moment on the air / So your head upon my breast / So my hand upon your hair.”
Drawing attention to the different versions of love as both an experience and a feeling, Kinsley includes Labi Siffre’s ‘Cannock Chase’ as a more visceral example of how you feel once you’re out of the other end of a specific event. “I’ve always loved this song and loved it even more when I heard it in Sentimental Value,” she says. “This song just makes me think of starting over, starting fresh. Love is being with yourself when the moment is over. Love is the drive home.”
In a similar way, Japanese Breakfast’s ‘Kokomo, IN’ is one Kinsley wishes she had written herself, and is particularly floored by the line, “If I could throw my arms around you, for just another day / Maybe it’d feel like the first time.” It’s “effortless and true and heartwrenching”, says Kinsley, which is why ending the playlist with Talking Heads’ ‘This Must Be The Place’ feels especially fitting – when love can feel like yearning, it can also feel like coming home.
Sarah Kinsley’s Valentine’s Day soundtrack:
- ‘A Walk Across Rooftops’ – The Blue Nile
- ‘True Love Leaves No Traces’ – Leonard Cohen
- ‘Without You’ – Winter
- ‘Cannock Chase’ – Labi Siffre
- ‘The Masquerade is Over’ – Nancy Wilson
- ‘Tears in the Typing Pool’ – Broadcast
- ‘Kokomo, IN’ – Japanese Breakfast
- ‘This Must Be The Place’ – Talking Heads
