Listen: Before I Loved You - Rynn

Having appeared on BlackPlastic.co.uk back in October with her track In My Head, LA-based musician Katheryn Kempthorne is back with her latest song under her Rynn moniker.

Before I Loved You feels like a counter to In My Head. That previous song described the feelings of trying to maintain a balanced perspective on the breakdown of a relationship - the bad as much as the good, the compromises. Before I Loved You is still a backward-looking song about love, but this time it’s a more sympathetic and uncertain experience, the feeling of walking away from a relationship only to find yourself still wanting it. In Rynn’s own words:

“Before I Loved You is about walking away from something and then falling in love with the fantasy of what could’ve been”

The song is constructed around a looping, heartbreaking vocal: “I lost you... Before I loved you”. The instrumentation exhibits this feeling, the noises seemingly pulled into the centre of that lyric like someone under the gravity-like pull of love... The sheer volume and detail in the music builds and builds throughout Before I Loved You’s four-minutes. Eventually it feels like it has lost all perspective, the aural equivalent of building emotional flotsam swirling around us. Sometimes that sense of detail feels innevitable... when you just want the same person for so long that they become like an additional personality in your life, even when they aren’t in it any more.

Stream: In My Head - Rynn

Rynn is Ohio-based singer-songwriter Kathryn Kempthorne and she has been experimenting with electronic music ever since she purchased her first synthesiser at the age of 14. Having scored over eight million Spotify streams with the song Islands from her debut EP Nightfires, Rynn is set to make waves when she unveils her second EP in the coming months.

In My Head, taken from the forthcoming EP, is a song about trying to understand a previous relationship - looking at the reality of the experience and what went wrong, rather than just focusing on the romanticised version that tends to get stuck in our memory.

On In My Head Rynn’s vocals alternate between higher pitched, high stakes emotion and the reassured and determined central line of “It’s all in my head”. She rattles off the compromises that existed in her relationship, as if to remind herself they existed. With layered synths and vocal harmonies, Rynn has created a piece of music that feels beautifully vulnerable.