20. A Q&A with Kate Hutchinson

We are rehearsing currently here in Athens, last night the streets were like rivers and Caoimhe was delayed. It’s a good way to start the year, underground in this place which is familiar and not now. The music will take a similar appearance, looking forward to meeting you in the middle of it, sending a bunch of warm and irreverent love to all who are currently under the oppression of others or themselves. If you wanted some clues about what we will bringing around with us, you can read the below. Let’s go.

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Here’s a transcription of the Q&A I did with Kate Hutchinson at Rough Trade Denmark St. on November 13th, 2025:

There’s a place always factored into your work in some way. It’s always kind of been almost like a character. How did place come to be such an important part of your work? Well, I think if you’re kind of alive to where you are, then I really believe that if you change your surroundings, your mind works in a different way. I think a lot of that’s to do with familiarity, so. And that can work in both ways. Sometimes it’s good to be in a place that’s familiar, because that can bring out certain things, strong abilities or something, that maybe you want. But I think if you put yourself into a kind of a foreign or an alien environment, I just think that it kind of makes, by necessity your mind is just kind of more open because it has to be because you don’t have any reference points. So you have to be more alert to what’s going on. I’ve never really been a planner, I think it’s more just where I find myself and then just trying to find a space within that in terms of what makes sense. But finding a place which puts everyone in a place where the record is the sole kind of animating reason to be there, and then we build a world there and we share in that collectively because we’re building a universe between us and a language in a place where none of us have any context.

I was thinking also about when you mentioned spring and you started it on guitar and then it’s on piano on the record. Tell us about that, because that changed halfway through or through the process. Yeah, well, again, that kind of embracing the space, because I wrote that song when I was on tour for an inbuilt fault, the last record, I wrote it while we were touring it. And I was playing it on the guitar during those shows. And I like it this way, but then, again, they had an amazing piano, a Steinway upright piano in that room with the high ceiling there. And because I was waking up so early, and you know, everyone else was taking care of themselves of waking up hours later. So I just played the piano, just, you know, because I just like playing it. And then, yeah, one morning I just kind of ended up transposing it by mistake and it seemed... it’s not better, but I thought it sang better for the record. Some of the textures on the record are heavy. And I just thought that there was a freshness to it on the piano, which is maybe different to how it was and guitar, so I decided to do it like that.