It's Monday, today, (hello!) and I'm going to write about Kathryn Williams.

Four years ago, I was in a magazine store and picked up something British - Mojo or Uncut or something, - and scanned a story about the Mercury Prize. What caught my attention was a line something like this: "...also nominated is Kathryn Williams, a female Nick Drake..."

There are countless singer-songwriters out there who idolize Mr Drake, and a great number who spend far too much time and money recording insipid, impotent tunes. Comparing her to him is moderately accurate, but it's also a little unfair. One soft-voiced folksinger need not be doing the same thing as another. Kathryn Williams owes something to Nick Drake, certainly, but also to Joni Mitchell, The Smiths, and herself. The Nick Drake ghetto can be a hamfisted pigeonhole.

As we were walking in the Market a few days ago, I commented to Julian that the problem with liking folkie/singer-songwriter stuff is that people assume you enjoy the work of every person who picks up an acoustic guitar and awkwardly serenades a patio. When I finally managed to find Kathryn Williams' material (which until Old Low Light was very difficult indeed, on this side of the Atlantic), I was very pleasantly surprised. Little Black Numbers is an altogether wonderful record - music made up of small gestures, subtle smiles. Her first record (Dog Leap Stairs) is rather disappointing, and some of her later work is hit-and-miss, but she's really an excellent singer, especially when she sings with her mind, and not just her voice.

(To go on a little tangent, I was reading this interview with Leslie Feist, and I had to wonder about what she said, exactly, which entitled the reporter to write this: "[Leslie says that] it?s more interesting to perform that sad song with no expression and let instrumentation and beautiful arrangements fill that space left open by the performer." The sentiment is completely right, of course, some of the time, but there are other moments when you must invest a little more and not just leave things "calm." That's probably Let It Die's biggest flaw - too much of it is pleasant, cool. (There's a reason that despite her phenomenal talent, most people don't own multiple Bebel Gilberto records; or that nobody's screaming for another Hem disc.) Kathryn's not so fantastic at "calm" - her version of "Hallelujah," for instance, plays things a little too nice, and the cover of Pavement's "Spit on a Stranger" lacks both hipness and an active wit.)

A three-song tour, then, of some of Kathryn Williams' best work, ending with a selection from her newest album, a collection of covers called Relations.

Kathryn Williams - "We Dug a Hole". The opening track from 2000's Little Black Numbers. It's halting at first, steps across stones in a grey creek. But Kathryn's voice slowly gains momentum - as do the guitar and acoustic bass. Lots of room in this song, open spaces for open hands and stretching arms. It's one of these things that I can't imagine translating into a live performance: the ebb and flow would be canned, the fluttering growth rehearsed. When the big bass drum joins in, cello stoking the fire, it builds to a green-and-swirling climax, voices and radio-chatter in the background - like Nick Drake, maybe, but only after a night of listening to White Light White Heat. (ok, i admit, that's stretching it.) [buy]

Kathryn Williams - "No One Takes You Home". A rousing anthem for feeling good when you're feeling bad, culled from 2002's Old Low Light, which was distributed by Warner (at least in Canada). From the very start, that accelerating strum signals that the song's going somewhere, heading downhill to a place that's lit up and full of music - a pub? a club? a friend's home?. Before long a cello's joined you on the lane, then a tambourine, and lo and behold there's a crowd: they've got wine-stained lips and eyes aglow. You march en masse, you join hands and probably flirt, you kick in a door and ask: "Why can't life give [us] some more?" By the time you're "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ing" there's some twee confetti in the air, a trumpet giving you long looks. Gladness. And then it's gone. [buy]

Kathryn Williams - "Thirteen". Relations is an exciting record for people who like Kathryn Williams, and for people who like covers, but not for those who dislike either. She doesn't do anything astonishing enough to convert the unconverted, nor are most of these tracks fine - or different - enough that they outshine the originals. Accept those caveats, however, and there's a lot of pleasure to be found on the album - after all, here's Kathryn doing Nico, the Velvet Underground, Pavement, Nirvana, and more. In front of us right now is, of course, a rendition of Big Star's "Thirteen." It's cool, first of all, because it features the only non-atrocious use of bongos that I can remember. It's also cool because it is completely great - it's happy and sad and nostalgic and regretful and not.

When you're young, certain things happen, and they're sad or they're sweet but somehow you know that later, thinking back, the moments will be sadder or sweeter still. That there's something magic in the childish Now that's fluttering beneath the surface, something that you can't quite grasp but know that one day you'll long for. Well that's what this song is about, and it's in the way Kathryn Williams sings, it's in the doo-wop mermaid voices, it's in the ephemeral-perfect guitar solo. It's all there, and then it's not, and you dream of it sometimes. [buy]