Kat Harlton
Australian singer-songwriter Kim Churchill recently released his EP Forgetting. Written, recorded and produced by Colin Stewart (Yukon Blonde / Dan Mangan) entirely in Canada, Forgetting is the second in a 4-part series, where each EP was written and recorded in different parts of the world. Kim shares that initially that wasn’t the plan, but like all good things, it just worked out that way, “Each collection of songs has begun to really fit with its title, I didn’t plan it that way, but it’s really worked out. The first EP I Am, was recorded in Berlin and it had a real sense of me trying to find myself again, to be honest. Berlin was such an exciting, new environment that I didn’t feel like I owed it anything, I didn’t feel like I had to be anyone for anybody. Sometimes when you’re with your close friends, it’s very hard to grow because they know you a certain way. So Berlin definitely allowed that to happen. It was also a timing thing, I was coming to some realizations about some very large parts of my life that were kind of trying to finish, and I wasn’t really accepting that, and I wasn’t growing. I became to kind of realize all of that in Berlin, my own awareness of where I’m at in my life. So if you take all of that into account, Forgetting has become very indicative of the immense change that immediately came after recording.”
For Forgetting, Kim spent time in the dense green rain forests of British Columbia on Canada’s west coast, which he says largely inspired his sense of self and sound, “Forgetting was a real time of contemplation and a time of accepting some of the enormous changes I had made, and writing some songs that were indictive of me surrendering to that process of change, and forgetting all the things I was clinging to that was stopping me from being able to grow. The music itself became a sort of soft, comfortable bed. Around that time my dad told me that I needed to go somewhere where I felt very safe, and this Canadian EP is very gentle and very comforting. It represents surrendering to something new, and the vulnerability and the delicate kind of nature that comes with that.”
That sense of “feeling safe” was something Kim desperately needed after having come out of a couple of major record deals, “There was a lot of ‘we need to get this right, we need to get that right’. That process had a stifled, stagnated feeling on my creative output, and it made it feel very liberating to get out of that. I just started writing ferociously. I do not, and did not have a care in the world for the quality of what I do, and I love that. I think creativity needs to be a kid on the concrete with crayons. The idea of releasing a really large body of work really appealed to me. I wanted to move away from albums because they were really frustrating me in how everybody puts it on a pedestal and thinks ‘is this going to make or break my career’?. I felt like I had a bunch of material I didn’t want to cull down to a bunch of songs to fit into an album, and I did really love the idea of a collection of EP’s. It felt fresh, it felt exciting, it felt inspiring.”
For more on Kim Churchill visit: https://www.kimchurchill.com