The Goo 1
Interview Words: Lili Karrenberg MARIA KELLY Afte
r a successful run of her debut album The Sum of the In-Between which amassed millions of Spotify streams in its first weeks, acclaimed singer-songwriter Maria Kelly returns four years later with her stunning new album Waiting Room. With her signature gossamer sound, this new body of work explores quiet frustration, societal expectations, the housing crisis and faded friendships against an instrumental background new to her and yet ever so moving. Your new album is a beautiful body of work and as a listener you can really tell that you have been through a lot of challenging experiences that have shaped you. What does this album represent and mean to you? I feel like each of my pieces of work I’ve put out has been a snapshot 8 of those ages of my life; This feels very much like my late 20s. It’s funny putting it out now, because I’ve just turned 30, and I feel like a different person to the one who originally wrote the album. When I listen to it now, I feel like it captures a confusing time of me trying to find my voice again amongst different internal and external roadblocks. It’s an album of trying to find control, to find your voice and learn how to speak up. I’m interested about how the writing process was for you. What kind of mindset did you enter whilst making the album? The process for this one was strange compared to the first album, where I feel like the first one sort of fell out of me at the time. This project was an uphill battle for most of it and a lot of that was from my own expectations of what I felt it needed to be. There were just so many outside pressures. And then I was also writing about some really difficult subject matters; I was going through a lot of chronic health issues at the time, and someone very close to me was sick, so I was spending a lot of time in literal waiting rooms. There were just loads of difficult, heavy things happening in my life, I think you can hear that in this album. But when I look back now I think this silver lining was challenging me to grow past what I thought I could do. A lot of it was just a mental challenge of ‘No, keep going, keep growing past this’ and so much of that came from the people I work with and my friends pushing me to keep going.