Introducing Kathleen: “The Longest Year” debuts today with video

Rising songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Kathleen veils her debut single, “The Longest Year,” today alongside an accompanying video directed by Will Mustin.

“The Longest Year” really came out of sheer confusion and overstimulation from so much hard and indigestible news,” says Kathleen. “You’re scrolling scrolling and one post is your cousin’s baby, then an ad for organic tampons, then a photo of a dead toddler on a beach in Syria. Your brain is just like duh-waat? So it shuts down. I’d come up with the verse chord progression and was noodling on it with one hand while scrolling Instagram with the other. I remember one post was on Trump, even before he’d hit the primaries, when MAGA was first waking back up from the Reagan era. And then immediately below it was some science account announcing that most of the Great Barrier reef had been pronounced dead. The surreality of the back to back information just struck me so hard. It took me two years to finish the song after that—every line had to come from as truthful of a place. Had to come from that same feeling of insurmountable helplessness, guilt and total emotional exhaustion.”

Born on an island in Washington and raised in the Rocky Mountains by a park ranger turned physician’s assistant and a doctor alongside a sister who is now an evolutionary biologist. Kathleen finds her foremost inspiration in nature. From the age of seven, when she began writing songs, she found herself directly engaged with the world around her—its maximalism in the mountain landscapes of Colorado and its minutiae, the pattern of leaves as a vine climbs a wall or the insects living in a fallen log. As a teenager, she became a competitive skier and was transfixed by the great silence of freshly fallen snow. Her work investigates these natural extremes and how they apply to our everyday lives—”I want you to cry in public,” she says of its intended effect.

The Longest Year

The great barrier reef was
recently pronounced dead
Its last holy words were not
“make America great again”
which way does the wind blow Dylan?
I’m standing in the storm but I’ve lost my sense of feeling

Ideas climb out of bed and
Promise that they’ll fix it
I look at you, you look at me
And we excitedly agree
That one day we’re sure gonna fix it
Something comes up and we all fall back asleep

Oh it’s been the longest year of our lives

I close my eyes
And relive every moment
100 sleepless nights
Enough to make the comedians cry
Which way does the wind blow Dylan?
I’m in the line of fire but I’ve lost my sense of feeling

Oh its been the longest year
It’s been the longest year
It’s been the longest year
Of our lives

What kind of dream is this?
What’s gonna happen next?
What kind of dream is this?
What’s gonna happen happen next?

Every other day we break another record
How many more till there’s nothing left
Oh here we go again into another
Longest year