Kitty Macfarlane
Folk | Singer-Songwriter
“Her remarkably accomplished debut album, Namer Of Clouds, beguiles with its poetry and tenderness, and her eye for detail, vivid imagination and bright vocals make it a captivating listen. She is a talent to watch” – The Guardian
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.
As well as guest-presenting shows on BBC Radio 4 and 3 (Open Country, and The Essay), and featuring on award-winning podcast Folk On Foot, Kitty was recently nominated for the Horizon Award in the 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. As a bird enthusiast, Kitty was invited to guest-present several episodes of Radio 4’s Tweet of the Day and also performed a live session on BBC Radio 2.
Kitty Macfarlane’s debut album Namer Of Clouds 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.