Kelly Lee Owens underwent something called “body trauma release therapy.” The best way to describe it, she explains, is by analogy: when a zebra gets cornered by a lion, its body shuts down, and the tension will remain even if the lion leaves—and we experience stress much in the same way, storing trauma physically until we find some way to release it.
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That’s where the therapy starts: “This woman went from the top of my head to the tip of my toes, voicing different sounds. I wasn’t in control, and that was the point.” Afterward, “all the things I had been literally holding on to, everything I didn’t want to deal with came up. That just happened to be the week I had to finalize all the lyrics and melodies for my album. So there was no filter.”
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Inner Song, is one of the best of the year. The follow-up to Owens’s critically acclaimed 2017 debut, it’s an introspective but expansive set of sometimes meditative, sometimes propulsive electronic pop songs. There’s an undeniable healing quality to Owens’s music that feels especially satisfying in 2020.
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Welsh musician Kelly Lee Owens opens her excellent new album, Inner Song, with a provocative thought experiment: What would have happened if Radiohead had never turned back from the course they began charting on Kid A? Owens’ instrumental cover of In Rainbows highlight “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” is all glacial synth tones, sub-bass rumbles, and sleek machine beats, transposing the artful guitar interplay of the original into an alternate universe of Warp Records weirdness.
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Given Owens’s background and interests, this may not be a surprise. As a teenager, she worked in a cancer hospital, which gave her a strong set of values about life, death, and wellness at an early age. “People thought I was young to be surrounded by death, but it’s seriously inspiring. It’s a privilege to be there at the end of someone’s life. It’s going to happen to all of us, we need to be able to talk about this,” she reflects. “There are people who are birth doulas. Honestly, I could be a death doula! I know that sounds crazy, but after however many albums, that’s something that I will consider, seriously.”