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Aug 04, 2020 By Christopher Roberts John Cale

Welsh electronic music artist/producer Kelly Lee Owens is releasing a new album, Inner Song, on August 28 via Smalltown Supersound. Now she has shared another song from it, “Corner of My Sky,” which features fellow Welsh artist John Cale, who sings in both Welsh and English on the song. The two met when Owens was working on a song for Cale. Listen below.

Cale had this to say about the song in a press release: “It’s not usually this immediate that a productive afternoon brings a satisfying conclusion to a task. Kelly sent me a track she’d written—an instrumental that was a gentle drift—something comfortably familiar to what I’d been working on myself. On the first listen, the lyrics came with ease and a chorus and melody grew out of it. Even the Welsh phrases seemed to develop from a place of reflective memory which was a surprise since I hadn’t written in Welsh for decades. Once finished, I realized there existed a built-in thread we’d created together and apart—and her kind spirit pulled it all together and in quick order.”

Owens also had this to say: “I knew with this album I needed to connect with my roots and therefore having the Welsh language featured on the record felt very important to me. Once the music for the track was written and the sounds were formed, I sent the track straight to John and asked if he could perhaps delve into his Welsh heritage and tell the story of the land via spoken-word, poetry and song. What he sent back was nothing short of phenomenal. The arrangement was done during the mixing process and once I’d finished the track, I cried—firstly feeling incredibly lucky to have collaborated with John and his eternal talent and secondly for both of us to have been able to connect to our homeland in this way.”

Inner Song was due out May 1, but has since been pushed back due to COVID-19. Previously Owens shared its first single, “Melt!,” via a video for the new song. Then she shared its second single, the hypnotic “Night,” which was on of our Songs of the Week. Then Owens shared the album’s third single, “On,” via a video for the track (which also made our Songs of the Week list).

Inner Song is the follow-up to Owens’ self-titled debut album, released in 2017 via Smalltown Supersound (it was one of our Top 100 Albums of 2017). In May 2019 Owens shared two new songs, “Let It Go” and “Omen,” with “Let It Go” making our Songs of the Week list. Neither song is on the new album. In December 2019 Owens teamed up with Jon Hopkins for the seven-minute long new song, “Luminous Spaces.” It was originally intended to be an Owens remix of Hopkins’ “Luminous Beings” but morphed into its own thing once the pair got into the studio together. “Luminous Spaces” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list and is also not featured on Inner Song.

Inner Song opens with a cover of Radiohead’s “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” from 2007’s In Rainbows, but Owens’ version is just titled “Arpeggi.”

In a previous press release, Owens said creating Inner Song was “the hardest three years of my life…my creative life and everything I’d worked for up to that point was deeply impacted. I wasn’t sure if I could make anything anymore, and it took quite a lot of courage to get to a point where I could create again.”

The album’s title is borrowed from Alan Silva’s free jazz album of the same name from 1972. Owens said the title “really reflects what it felt like to make this record. I did a lot of inner work in the past few years, and this is a true reflection of that.”

Read our 2017 interview with Kelly Lee Owens.

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