Released: March 24
Katie Melua documents a period of personal change across her delicate ninth album ‘Love & Money’.
The singer-songwriter’s 10-track collection – the follow-up to 2020’s Top 10 ‘Album No. 8’ – is produced by Leo Abrahams and was recorded at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios last summer while she was pregnant with her son.
It’s one of a number of changes she’s experienced in recent times that are explored on the album, which juxtaposes personal highs, such as meeting her new partner, and lows like the death of the psychiatrist who cared for her following her hospitalisation in 2020 after she suffered a nervous breakdown, along with professional challenges faced by Katie and her peers in the ever-shifting music industry.
The latter is a theme best encompassed on lead track Golden Record, of which she says: “It’s about the scene changing and being a woman in the music industry and how strange and lucky I feel to have a job I’m addicted to. This approach for nearly 20 years led me to being very dogmatic and leaving very little space for my life at home.
“Writing Golden Record, it was like I was finally making peace with it all, accepting how things have changed in the industry, being happy with my lot at home and ready to face the fear of letting go of the forever funfair of the music industry.”
Of the personal moments on offer, the dreamy, sun-soaked mid-tempo Quiet Moves is an intimate portrayal of her partner’s traits and characteristics through her eyes, while First Date reads like a page from the musician’s diary, inspired by the early time they spent together – on a seaweed-collecting excursion in Margate.
Meanwhile, the lush 14 Windows is one of the deepest moments on the set and a tribute to Dr Mike McPhillips who, 12 years after helping Katie through a difficult period, took his own life. “It’s hard to speak about,” she says, “Because I saw him for a solid two years and we stayed in touch ever since, but I didn’t get to see him before I got around to telling him that I’d finally found the soul mate he always said was out there.”
It’s a bittersweet moment that brings home the finite nature of life like only experiencing loss can, while in its own way helping the singer navigate her own circumstances and live in the moment as she enters a new phase in her life.
In many ways, ‘Love & Money’ is a therapy session in itself; tenderly exploring key moments from recent memory and offering an intimate – and often understated – portrayal of Katie Melua as she stands today.
‘Love & Money’ is available now.
