Kitty Macfarlane: Lynsey de Paul Prize Runner Up 2017
Kitty Macfarlane is a songwriter and guitarist from Somerset, whose music is rich with visual imagery and written with an eco-eye. From the starling murmurations on the Somerset Levels to the lowly eel’s epic transatlantic migration, and the small part we ourselves play in a much bigger picture, her songs are bound by the underlying theme of mankind’s relationship with the wild.
Kitty Macfarlane’s highly anticipated debut album Namer Of Clouds, released September 2018 and produced by Sam Kelly and Jacob J Stoney, gathers inspiration from the sky to the seabed. Carried by a voice ‘as clear as a mountain stream’ (FRUK), her lyrics touch on intervention and rewilding, climate change and migration, and woman’s historical relationship with textiles and the land. The album (and as of recently, her live show) is augmented by all kinds of ‘found sound’ recorded in locations from Somerset to Sardinia – birdsong, waterfalls, the click of knitting needles – and bookended by sounds of the wild.
Kitty has recently been nominated for the Horizon Award in the 2019 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Her debut album Namer Of Clouds was one of The Guardian’s Best Folk Albums of 2018 with airplay across BBC Radio 2, 3, 4 and 6 Music, meriting FATEA’s award for Female Artist of the Year and being nominated for Album Of The Year in the fRoots Critics Poll.