In July, Katie Malco released “Fatal Attraction,” featuring Laura Stevenson, marking her first new material since her 2020 debut album, Failures. This week, the British singer-songwriter is back with a deeply emotional track titled “Babette,” which features SOAK.
Malco shared the inspiration behind “Babette,” explaining, “I wrote ‘Babette’ after a phone call with someone where I felt I didn’t say any of the right things. They couldn’t hear me (both literally and metaphorically), and when I hung up, I felt that I didn’t fit into their life.” This experience led her to explore themes of communication and connection in the song.
She elaborated on the song’s themes, stating, “I think the phone call is an analogy for not always knowing how to fit into social situations. I’m either too quiet and reserved or too loud and boisterous, but I can’t help it. My personality can be a little too extreme in one direction or the other, and when I wrote ‘Babette,’ I felt helpless to change it.”
Bridie Monds-Watson, known as SOAK, reflected on their journey together, saying, “Katie and I navigated our way through North America with little more than our drivers’ licenses and delusion about a year ago. Night after night, when Katie began ‘Babette,’ the relief was immediate. Not only had we successfully located the venue and survived that day’s gas station ‘lunch,’ but we were really doing the thing! We were playing music in towns with names we couldn’t pronounce to handfuls of welcoming strangers. What more could we have asked for?”
English