Photo: Jennifer Keith
“Please Don’t Be Late” is the first single off of Kate Boothman’s forthcoming record, My Next Mistake, a collection of songs about isolation, killing time, and accepting the unacceptable. Themes that resonate with this period of enforced global solitude.
This is the world slowed down, made slurry, woozy. Tired, haunted, gutted. Overwhelmed with hunger. “I want all of it, the shit you did as a little kid.” A wraith. A reckoning. Black tar stains, clothes on the floor, knocks on the door. “When I was 17, I knew everything.” Languid nights followed by mornings of bile and smoke and perfume. Aging. “I was everything when I was 17.” You never hear me call. Isolation in excess, isolation in temperance. Spinning. I can feel it in the back of my throat. Dirty. Lovers leaving the party separately. Tears falling down a face like a drunk falling down the stairs… Just fooling, just fooling around. Not the girl with the ribbon in her hair.
With a sound that evokes ballads by Todd Rundgren and Big Star, these are songs that accept intimacy as conditional. These are songs that aren’t afraid to say please, even as they recognize how small a space they’ve learned to make for their needs. They expect little and sugarcoat nothing. “I am alone here tonight,” Boothman sings and there’s no hint of self-pity. We can’t look away, but to be close is, in these shadowlands, to be implicated."
- Damian Rogers