Something For Kate’s New Song Is Exactly What We Need Right Now

A lot of lead time goes into making new material for musicians. There’s the writing, recording, mixing and mastering… it’s a process that can take months, sometimes years. By the time we as punters hear new material, an act may have been living with it for a very long time. And despite best laid plans, an act might find themselves releasing new music into a vastly different world in which it was written and recorded. Like, say, a global pandemic.

And so it is with Something For Kate. They have just released their first new track in eight years, Situation Room. Not only is there the task of re-introducing themselves to folks after a long absence from having new material, but the challenge of doing so into a world that also finds itself self-isolating and social distancing.

“Firstly, we're really excited just to have this new album done and we're excited to finally be sharing the music with people. Obviously, it's not happening the way we thought it would. Nothing's happening the way anyone thought it was going to be," Something For Kate vocalist and guitarist Paul Dempsey tells The Music.

"So we're not going to be able to go out and do the shows that we were going to do. And we're not going to be able to do the usual sorts of things you would do when you're when you're putting something new out.

“I guess we're just lucky now that the music can still get out there widely to people without anyone having to leave their homes and hopefully music can be a great form of escape or it can be a welcome distraction. So I just hope it's a welcome escape from whatever the situation might be right now. You just hope that it's something positive that you can put out there during a challenging time.”

It’s a belief that the band held fast to, even as other acts have been pushing back impending releases (Sam Smith, Lady Gaga, DMA’S to name just a few). Something For Kate decided to press on and release this new song into the world.

“Well, we did talk about holding off. And I mean, really, up until a week ago, we were talking about holding off,” Dempsey admits.

“I think it's just a question of being able to read the room. From what we've been able to see, music is very much a positive thing in people's lives at the moment, because many people are stuck at home. So they're probably listening to more music than ever, and they're watching TV and reading books, and they're actually being able to enjoy some escapism - and it seems that music is very much a welcome part of that. So we thought, ‘Okay, well, let's go ahead.’ We're not going to make any predictions going forward about the album release. We want to get it out there, we want to share it with people. But you know, I think everybody has realised recently that even predicting a week from now is kind of folly.

“People have known this single was coming for a while, so we didn't want to suddenly pull it. And at least now, like I said, it seems like music is still like a really welcome, positive thing. So it feels good to be putting it out there.”

Back in December, Something For Kate posted a triumphant message that stated “Album complete. Schedule scheduled”. And although said schedule is well and truly out the window with intended shows now no longer taking place, Dempsey is philosophical about the situation not only the band finds themselves in, but the world at large.

“Everyone is in the same boat. I’m loath to complain about it because we're all going through the same thing. It's just hard for everyone right now. It’s hard for musicians, it’s hard for hairdressers, it’s hard for hourly casual workers. There’s no one that this isn’t hitting right now. Everyone’s just gotta find a way through,” he says.

“I feel like we have way more things to be grateful for than we do to complain about. So this is obviously a challenge for everyone. I feel more grateful than I do angry or disappointed. We are so lucky to have built up what we’ve built up over such a long career and I feel like it’s going to be much easier for us when things finally do get going again. We've been doing this so long that we’ll be able to find our groove pretty quickly. And obviously we'll just be excited to get out there and we hope that everyone also is sort of feeling that when the time comes - we just really look forward to seeing our audience. And I'm sure everybody's gonna have a really different mood, but I don’t think I want to get that far ahead. We’re just keeping it right now just about this one song that we can put out there.”

Deciding to release Situation Room was a decision made a while ago as the song had the “right feeling”. “The fact that it’s called Situation Room and has the subject matter that it has, obviously that was all decided before any of this happened, so there might be an air of coincidence about it. The song had the right feel and it was going to be maybe a little bit of unexpected as a return for us,” Dempsey outlines.

Broadly speaking, the song’s subject matter is about control and certain things you can’t get control over - and of course, the world finds itself in a situation it has very little control over with the spread of the coronavirus.

“The subject matter of the song is fairly universal. It's about just that moment where you have to kind of throw up your hands and surrender because you're faced with something that is completely beyond your control. Steph [Ashworth, Something For Kate bass player] kind of came up with the music and we worked it up together in rehearsal and then I wrote the lyrics.

“When I wrote the lyrics I guess I was really just thinking about the way that you can try and mitigate things and the way you can avoid risks and pitfalls and the way you can try and predict what's going to happen just ahead of you, so that you avoid disaster. But then there are always going to be these people in your life, or events in your life, or situations, that are just going to hit you for six. And it's about that moment of just sort of going, ‘I've got nothing here, I’ve been knocked for six.’ It’s about that moment of surrender. And in a weird way for me it’s almost like a celebration of that moment; it’s not necessarily a negative thing, it’s almost like you're offering a round of applause to that thing that just hit you out of the park.

“That’s what that song is about. It was written a year ago. People just want to hear it and they're going to attach their own meaning to it. ‘Cause that’s the thing about music, everyone attaches their own meaning to it. I’m interested just for people to hear it and eventually it all ripples back to you and you start to get some sense of what they’ve read into it.”

Retracing the band’s steps in creating new music sees them recording in Byron Bay, mixing in Toronto, mastering in Perth and filming a video clip in LA. Such travelling seems like a lifetime ago in current times. “It sure does, but doesn’t last Wednesday feel like a lifetime ago?” Dempsey states. “Just travelling around like that… we all think very differently about virtually everything now. For many of us, this is the first time we've lived through a historical event of truly global proportions. It’s an interesting time to be alive.”

In fact, when the band got back from LA nearly a month ago, they saw the writing on the wall and began practising social distancing and were self-isolating well before it was Government mandated. “Even though there weren’t any bans or restrictions in place yet, we had kind of read enough ourselves to just make the decision to just isolate ourselves, just because we couldn't have known if we may have been carrying anything or not,” Dempsey says. “So we just took the cautious way and just stayed at home, so we've been doing it for about a month now and everyone's fine, no one ended up being sick or anything, but we’ve been home for a while and we’ve gotten into a bit of a routine, so it’s okay.”

And a silver lining coming from self-isolation, especially from the creative community, is what will come out however many months down the line when we finally emerge from the current situation as people now have a lot of time on their hands to conceive new ideas. “That’s all I’ve really been doing since we got back,” Dempsey outlines. “Like I said we went into self imposed isolation well before the situation really accelerated here, so I've been working away in my own studio for weeks now, there’s not a whole lot else to do. There's gonna be a lot of stuff. And it’s going to be amazing to get everybody’s different mood and everyone's different take on it.”