Kathleen, has released “Asking The Aspens.” Written by Kathleen and Daniel Nigro, “Asking The Aspens” was produced by Noah Conrad and Ariel Rechtshaid (Adele, Beyoncé, Vampire Weekend, HAIM, Kelela). The song follows her debut single “The Longest Year,” with both tracks taken from her forthcoming debut EP Kathleen I, due out, on May 8th via Let Me Know/Warner.

“I’d been thinking a lot about how the Aspen trees in my hometown grow,” says Kathleen. “How sometimes, Aspens grow from seeds, but usually they shoot up from the root system. So a lot of times, an entire grove could be just one tree, shooting up hundreds of little trees from its roots below the ground for tens of thousands of years. The image of a boy growing out of the root system kept coming to mind. Truthfully, I don’t fully know what it means to me, but the line wouldn’t budge so I had to just trust it. The rest of the song was pulled out of two of my poems, called ‘Gravity in Water’ and ‘She is the vascular system of a love song.’”

Born on an island in Washington and raised in the Rocky Mountains by a park ranger turned physician’s assistant and a doctor, alongside a sister who is studying evolutionary biology, Kathleen finds her foremost inspiration in nature. From the age of seven, when she began writing songs, she found herself directly engaged with the world around her—its maximalism in the mountain landscapes of Colorado and its minutiae, the pattern of leaves as a vine climbs a wall or the insects living in a fallen log. She grew up ski racing, but was always more interested in the great silence of the snow beneath the chairlifts and the total freedom inside the forests of the back bowls over competitions or techniques. Her work investigates these natural extremes and how they apply to our everyday lives—“I want you to cry in public,” she says of its intended effect.

“Asking The Aspens”

There were times in the middle when I held you
Between my thoughts
Like when you burned all your paintings in the backyard
Couldn’t be stopped
Or how you hammered up a ladder to summit the roof
And Dean held the nails
There were times in the middle when I loved you
Heavy and soft
We were way too stoned to stand
But we made it to the top
And you were holding both my hands
And tryna pull me up
Mmm
Cause I was ten then I was fifteen
Then I was yesterday afternoon
And I was hanging from the feeling
That someday you would bloom
Just asking the aspens to grow a boy like you
I keep asking the aspens to grow a boy like you
There were times in the middle when I held you
And it felt like snow
Yeah you’re the only kind of weather so weightless
I can’t feel when I’ve let you go
And there you aren’t in any of it
Hanging sideways like a tree
In the hillside of last summer
In the hillside of a memory
We were way too stoned to stand
But we made it to the top
And you were holding both my hands
And tryna pull me up

Mmm
Cause I was ten then I was fifteen
Then I was yesterday afternoon
And I was hanging from the feeling
That someday you would bloom
Just asking the aspens to grow a boy like you
I keep asking the aspens to grow a boy like you