Kathryn Williams: “Making songs in the quiet margins of motherhood and memory, shaped by time’s shifting tides”. Picture: Emma Holbrook
KATHRYN Williams launches the second leg of her Mystery Park Tour at Pocklington Arts Centre tomorrow, fresh from celebrating her 52nd birthday on Monday.
“I was always disappointed I wasn’t born on Valentine’s Day, but I’ve discovered my birthday falls [a day later] on Lupercalia, the she-wolf festival, ancient Rome, Romulus & Remus and all that,” says Liverpool-born, Newcastle-based folk singer, songwriter, Arvon tutor, novelist, Before The Light Goes Out podcaster and watercolour and portrait artist.
Released on One Little Independent Records last September, Mystery Park is Kathryn’s 18th album: a deeply personal collection marked by emotional depth and lyrical precision in 11 reflective songs, “made in the quiet margins of motherhood and memory, shaped by time’s shifting tides”.
“This record is for anyone who’s felt something and kept it quiet,” says Kathryn. “For those private echoes. I hope these songs give people space to hear their own.
“The cover artwork is my own painting, based on the willow pattern from my grandmother’s tea sets. Each part of it ties into the songs: a map of memories.”
Kathryn expands: “I think this album, more than anything, is a reflection of where I am in my life. A lot of songs on my other albums are works of imagination, flights of fancy, with fragments of what I’ve been doing. But this one places me on the bridge between parents getting older and kids getting older, and feeling that pull both ways. So I would say it’s my most personally revealing album.
“Writing these songs, you have the responsibility towards the people who the songs are about. It’s a pressure you feel, like if you were writing a memoir, where you want them to recognise themselves, as well as not hating you [for what Kathryn has written].”
Twenty-seven years since she self-released her debut album, Dog Leap Stairs, made for £80, working through the night in various studios, she sees a weightier significance in Mystery Park’s songs. “This far into my career, when I’m only two years off 30 years of putting music out, I kind of feel it’s a legacy record, with songs about my dad, my sons, other people in my life, and I hope these songs cast their nets out long after I’ve gone.”
“That song then walked towards me like in a mist,” says Kathryn Williams of her experience of writing This Mystery
Centrepiece song This Mystery utilises the metaphor of Kathryn seeing a record being shattered by a lorry driver as a symbol of her father’s dementia, or “memory being unplayable in the form that it was in,” as she puts it. “But this is a song for him, not the disease. Anyone who has had a loved one diagnosed with this cruelty will know how you just want to paint their skies blue and make everything all right,” she says.
“I wrote the opening words of that song a few years ago at an Arvon Foundation songwriting retreat at Lumb Back where I was tutoring. I was waiting at these traffic lights just before Hebden Bridge, when the lorry drove over the record,” she recalls. “That’s when I got a phone call from my mum.”
Pulling over to one side, she received the message that her father had been diagnosed with dementia, compounding the image in her head of the shattered vinyl. “That song then walked towards me like in a mist,” says Kathryn. “It’s been hard to sing it when they’ve come to a gig.”
Yet her father’s love of music, rooted in his own days as a singer in a folk group, is a solace. “Even now I’ll start singing a Paul Simon song to him and he’ll know the pitch and the tune, though he won’t necessarily know what day or what time of day it is,” says Kathryn.
As her father’s dementia progresses – he no longer attends Kathryn’s concerts – “it’s like holding someone, trying to stop them from falling off the cliff, so it’s really difficult.
“Even though we don’t have the answers, the only thing we can do is live each day in love – and some beautiful things come from his inability to find the words like he once did. Like when he couldn’t express the wonder of the pink skyline, he said, ‘Look what’s come downstairs’.”
Sea Of Shadows, co-written with Neill MacColl and producer Leo Abrahams, is a tribute to eldest son Louis, in response to watching him grow from infant to adult. “Parenthood isn’t fixed,” says Kathryn. “We think we will have small kids forever, but time quickens and before we know it, we have huge humans living with us where once there was a little baby. I love singing this song and thinking of him through the different images and travelling through time”.
Kathryn Williams’s artwork for her Mystery Park album cover. “It’s based on the willow pattern from my grandmother’s tea sets,” she says. “Each part of it ties into the songs – a map of memories”
Kathryn adds: “It’s not only about Louis; it’s also about me as a mother – and the amount of mothers who come up to me after a gig with tears in their eyes to say they really relate to that song. When listening to music, the one thing that really matters is if they connect with the song.
“That connectivity: that’s why I still continue to perform, despite finding it very difficult. I love the connection with the audience, so it’s about keeping up the energy and momentum on a tour, in spite of all the soul-sucking motorway travel.”
Closing track Servant Of The Flame was written for younger son Ted, capturing the act of sitting beside him while he plays video games: choosing presence, even in small moments, as an act of love, where Kathryn is “watching them evolve into their own identities. Seeing them struggle and hoping that they can navigate the ups and downs that we all face in life”.
Polly Paulusma is among Kathryn’s co-writers, penning Goodbye To Summer together on an Arvon retreat. “[We were] outside on two wooden chairs watching the dying sunlight tip off the wings of the swallows and the swifts,” Williams recalls. “The last hurrah of summer before they fly away. The seasons begin to mark more and more. How many summers do we have in one life? Will the birds fly back home? Polly writes in open tunings so the new paths to melodies felt giddying and fresh.”
One name leaps out from the credits above all others, Mr Paul Weller, Kathryn’s collaborator on Gossamer Wings, a song built from voice notes and texts, capturing a moment of creative chemistry born at a distance.
“This was the first thing we did together, working remotely,” she says. “Paul came up with the idea for the song and the title,” she says. “Then I researched ‘gossamer wings’, and I sent him quite a lot of texts, where he would reply, ‘well, that sounds like a lyric’.”
Such was Kathryn’s enthusiasm to show “I’m not lazy, I’m a good girl”, she recalls Paul once commenting, ‘that’s great, but you haven’t really involved me!’.”I was just trying to do my part!” she says.
Paul Weller: Co-writer of Gossamer Wings on Kathryn Williams’s Mystery Park album
“My eagerness to show him I was diligent made me barge on ahead without him on this one, but we pulled it together and I calmed the heck down for the second sitting. This was based on the title that Paul had and an idea of spirits breaking free from the constraints.”
Paul contributed vocals and Hammond organ to the recording, and they went on to write So Quietly together for Weller’s October 2024 EP Supplement: 66, featuring Kathryn on lead vocals and the late double bassist Danny Thompson on his last recording.
“Even yesterday [this interview was conducted on February 15], he sent a text to say lyrics I’d sent should be the first line of our next song together.”
Songs from Mystery Park will be predominant on her tour set list. “The majority of the gig will be the new material because I always think it’s a special thing to play them for the first time, when they also take on a different life from the record,” says Kathryn.
Songs from the back catalogue will feature too in the set, “though while some people forget songs they’ve written, I forget whole albums!” says Kathryn.
As on the tour’s first leg from October 5 to November 15 last autumn, She will be accompanied on guitar by Matt Deighton after he opens each show with a solo set. “For this tour, we’ve made a double A-side of our versions of Sea Of Shadows and Servant Of The Flame, from The Glasshouse [formerly Sage, Gateshead],” says Kathryn.
Look out for limited-edition seven-inch vinyl copies, housed in sleeves in five colours designed and made by Kathryn’s family, on the merchandise stall, run by her “wonderful best friend”, Sarah Williams, who will be driving the tour van too.
Kathryn Williams, Mystery Park Tour, with support and special guest Matt Deighton, Pocklington Arts Centre, tomorrow (20/2/2026), 8pm. Box office: 01759 301547 or pocklingtonartscentre.co.uk.
Kathryn Williams: Folk singer-songwriter, Arvon songwriting tutor, novelist (The Ormering Tide, 2021), Before the Light Goes Out podcaster, watercolour & portrait artist
Mystery Park track listing:
Thoughts Of My Own; Goodbye To Summer, co-written with Polly Paulusma; Gossamer Wings, co-written with Paul Weller; Tender, co-written with Polly Paulusma; This Mystery; Sea Of Shadows, co-written with Neill MacColl & Leo Abrahams; Move Me, co-written with Beth Nielsen Chapman; Knew You Forever; Sunsets and Servant Of The Flame.
Musicians on Mystery Park:
Kathryn Williams, vocals; Leo Abrahams,guitar, bass, keyboards, ukulele & piano, also album producer, arranger and mixer at The Shelter; Neill MacColl, guitar, vocals; Polly Paulusma, vocals, guitar (track 2 & 4); Paul Weller, vocals, Hammond organ (track 3); Ed Harcourt, piano (tracks 5, 6, 7 & 10), mariachi bass (track 7), vocals (track 10); Chris Vatalaro, drums, piano (track 9); David Ford, harmonica (track 7); Emma Smith, violin (tracks 5, 6 & 7).
Did you know?
KATHRYN Williams is hosting her Striking Features art exhibition at Start-Yard in Birkenhead, from January 16 to February 20 to coincide with the Mystery Park Tour (opening hours, Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm). Among the tour dates from February 20 to March 29 will be Future Yard, Birkenhead, on February 24.
Showcasing her work as a painter, the show features an intimate collection of portraits painted on matchboxes, alongside delicate watercolours and limited-edition prints. The collection captures character, emotion and quiet beauty, reflecting Kathryn’s style at the intersection of music and visual expression.
“I’ve been offered another exhibition in Newcastle, where it will open at the Biscuit Factory on May 8,” reveals Kathryn, who trained at art school in Newcastle and has designed the artwork for several of her album covers, such as Dog Leap Stairs and Mystery Park.
Kathryn Williams’s podcast
Did you know too?
KATHRYN is working on the third series of her bed-themed Before The Light Goes Out podcast, lining up her latest interviewees to explore the gap between wake and sleep.
In each episode, Kathryn talks to a special guest from the world of music or literature about “what they do as they enter the realm of sleep, what has changed for them over the years and other things”.
What is Lupercalia?
THIS ancient Roman pastoral festival, observed on February 15 with its rituals to drive out evil spirits, promotes health, fertility and purification. It is tied closely to the founding legend of Rome and the Lupercal cave, where Romulus and Remus were nurtured allegedly by a she-wolf.
