Nathalie King takes you along on her journey of emotional healing in her haunting new single You — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
It’s an age-old story: Your parents mess you up, only for you to mess yourself up further by carrying the negative lessons they taught you into your adult relationships. And then you write a bunch of songs about it all.
Well, you do if you’re King, a Toronto songstress who’s entered the homestretch of her own healing process on her liberating new single. With a stark, unvarnished beauty, the song captures perfectly the cascade of sometimes conflicting emotions that accompanies childhood trauma and its ensuing adult self-sabotage. Yet the recorded result isn’t cathartic just for King herself, but also for anyone who’s in need of a little auditory TLC:
“Take this heart
Don’t wanna have it anymore
You taught me how to build a wall
Can’t hurt no more
And I’m losing, losing myself
And I’m missing, missing ourselves
There’s a beast under my skin
It’s raging, raging
If you look close
You’ll see it’s only hurting, only hurting
Hold me close.”
“You is about the innermost, softest and most vulnerable part of you, lying underneath the many thick layers we put on to protect ourselves in this world,” King explains. “It shows a deeper understanding of why people wear masks: Because they have been hurt by someone — maybe society itself — and so they shut away the gentle, beautiful, compassionate, soft part of them to protect themselves.”
Yes, she’s speaking of herself first and foremost. Just not exclusively. “We all have done that in some capacity. The lyrics talk about closing my heart off because it has been hurt by someone in a relationship, the same way I was hurt by my parents as a child. But deep down, there is a wish to be loved underneath ‘the beast,’ which is a symbol of angry emotions coming out sometimes.”
The final piece in the puzzle, she says, is realizing that we’re in control of our own destiny: that we ourselves are “the programmer that can rewire our bad habits and trauma and create a better life for ourselves.”
It’s hard to deny that message when its vessel is as compelling as You, a stately ballad with a piano part that drops like gently falling rain and an almost subliminal drum track (which is really the pedal of the piano) that gives plenty of breathing room to King’s nuanced and delicate vocal. The composition and arrangement coalesce to fully exploit the French Vietnamese/German-born King’s talents as a sultry, jazzy singer while nodding toward her fascination with electropop and trip-hop.
That fascination comes into full flower on her new EP PTSD, a six-song statement of intent that, although recorded in Toronto, has a distinct U.K.-electronica flavour thanks to the influence of Bristol producer Joseph Snook. He’s proven an ideal companion on King’s musical and emotional journey, providing a smoothly flowing undercurrent to songs like that are by turns soothing and unsettling, as the subject matter requires.
“I decided it was time to write about my childhood trauma, as its struggles have accompanied me my whole life,” King says. “I felt ashamed to talk about it in public, or even to write songs about it. But as I have been healing in therapy and making steps toward a more healthy, mindful lifestyle, I felt it was time to make an entire EP about the past events, the past and present struggles and the light at the end of the tunnel. I am in a better place now, but the learning path is long and ongoing.”
Her professional path has certainly had more than its share of successes so far. With the 2013 album Odyssey and singles like Break Away and Ghost Rider to her credit, she’s had songs placed in commercials and TV programs. She’s on top of her visual presentation as well, having hand-animated her own video for Suckr for Love in 2019. The video was screened at film festivals across the world, won Best Music Video at the Experimental, Dance & Music Film contest in Toronto, and was named a finalist in several other festivals. In 2016, she placed as a semi-finalist at both Indieweek and the International Songwriting Competition. As a live act, she’s become a presence on the Toronto scene, while maintaining a profile in her native Germany.
For the immediate future, though, her main focus is on PTSD — both the condition and the record that now bears its name. “I’d like to encourage the listener to experience the entire EP,” she says, “to fully understand the healing journey and to take an important message from it: That you are enough, and that every one of you brings something to the world that is unique.”
Check out You above, hear more from Nathalie King below, and find her on her website, Facebook and Instagram.
