Kim Churchill’s latest single ‘After The Sun’ is the musician’s most emotive work to date.
To the layman, musicianship and songwriting tend to be synonymous however the reality is that the ability to craft a decent tune is a rare ability that is generally honed over many years.
Despite still being two birthdays outside of turning 30, for Australian folk-rock troubadour Kim Churchill raw talent and hard work saw him put out his first major label LP Silence/Win at age 23.
Last month, Churchill released a new single, ‘After The Sun’, a song that while instilled with the effortless coastal charm of his previous work, also features a deeply emotive twist. For the song’s final refrain, the chorus of, “No need to run when the sun is coming” drops a key into, “No need to lie when your heart is hurting/Sometimes I try to hard to be something”. The gravitas of this mood shift demonstrates the evolution of Churchill’s songwriting.
“That second line of the outro is straight from the heart, talking about a big life lesson of mine,” Churchill says.
Churchill is now pushed to extrapolate on this life lesson. “The lesson is that I have been held back by trying too fucking hard – agonising over lyrics because I have this idea in my head as to what is good and I try way too hard to achieve this goal and in the process I stop enjoying myself.”
In order to understand why Churchill was trying too hard we need to go back to his aforementioned 2014 debut that featured the single ‘Window to the Sky’. The song was a global hit that got a second life in 2015 when French producer The Avener reworked it into his dance track ‘You’re My Window to the Sky’.
Churchill discusses the downside of this song’s runaway success. “When I wrote ‘Window to the Sky’ it didn’t stand out to me, I mean, I nearly never released it because it was so poppy and came to me so easily, I never thought of it as the song that would be the most important for my career.
“In hindsight if I could have told myself then how important the song was going to be I probably would have fucked it up. That is until now when finally I have lifted the pressure the success of that song laid on me.”
This shark tank nature of the music industry not only manifests as personal pressure but, as Churchill explains, it can manifest as a ghetto mentality between artists. “Everybody is either getting inspired off each other and getting creative off the ways other people are using other people’s shit or they’re shitty and resentful about it.
“Everybody is using everybody’s shit, there is no way around it. At the core of it all, there’s eight notes.” This statement is punctuated by an exacerbated chuckle.
“I have had every situation, I have had artists that I am trying to imitate me have a go at me; I have had artists imitate me that have had enormous success and conversely there are artists that openly nominate me as their inspiration and they suck so, only for a moment, I start to think I suck too.”
Churchill now succinctly sums up the topic of imitation in music by concluding, “The only time it gets to a situation where it leaves a bad taste in your mouth is when someone jumps up and down and tries to pretend that they invented the genre.”
Kim Churchill’s new EP, I AM, is out Friday May 3. The songwriter takes to Howler on Saturday June 15. Head to Churchill’s website for tickets.
