Description

Kathryn Williams – Songs From The Novel ‘Greatest Hits’

16 track album on standard CD, hardback CD, and double gatefold vinyl.

Mercury-nominated singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams released this ‘soundtrack album’ to the novel by best-selling author Laura Barnett in 2017. Greatest Hits, the hotly-anticipated follow-up to Barnett’s novel The Versions of Us, follows the life of a fictional singer. The original songs are written by Kathryn Williams, with lyrics by Laura Barnett and Kathryn Williams.

Laura Barnett’s acclaimed debut novel The Versions of Us was a Number One Bestseller and has sold over 200,000 copies in the UK alone, while Kathryn Williams enjoyed huge success with her Sylvia Plath tribute album Hypoxia and her most recent collaborative album with jazz musician Anthony Kerr – Resonator. The artist teamed up with Romeo Stodart of The Magic Numbers to produce Songs From The Novel [Greatest Hits], while his sister Michele Stodart contributed instrumentation to the record. The siblings also both contributed their signature vocals to the richly diverse album.

The novel Greatest Hits tells the story of Cass Williams, a fictional musical artist who enjoyed huge success from the early ’70s, only to retire mysteriously at the height of her fame. Two decades later, she is spending a single day in her recording studio, picking out tracks for a very personal Greatest Hits album. Each chapter of Greatest Hits opens with one of these songs and takes the reader back through Cass’s life, from her childhood, through her earliest days as a singer, to the terrible crisis that caused her to flee her own life. The accompanying album by Kathryn Williams brings each song chosen for Cass’s Greatest Hits record to life, with every track written and recorded in the style of the corresponding era.

Talking about the project, the critically acclaimed singer said: “After making my album Hypoxia inspired by The Bell Jar, I didn’t think that I would be collaborating with another author so soon – and a living one to boot!

“I got a call from Laura after she had heard me on Cerys Matthews’ BBC6Music show talking about Hypoxia. She asked me if I was up for working on a parallel project to bring her fictional songwriter’s songs to life. Since then, we have co-written a group of 16 songs, cried, laughed and become close friends. It has been a joyous project of immersing ourselves into the character, the ups and downs of her career and her personal life.”

Tracklist:

1. Common Ground
2. Architect
3. LivingFree
4. I Wrote You A Love Song
5. Just Us Two
6. Road Of Shadows
7. Don’t Step On The Cracks
8. She Wears A Dress
9. Lilies
10. Brightest Star
11. In This Garden
12. Queen Of The Snow
13. Home
14. Edge Of The World
15. Gethsemane
16. When Morning Comes