Tenderness aka: Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir), has released new single “Database Blues”, the track is off the artist’s debut album True, arriving March 13th via Amorphous Sounds. The track follows previous single “We’ll Always Have Paris 1919.” Tenderness plays a headline London show at St Pancras Old Church on March 18th.

Tenderness on “Database Blues:”

“”Database Blues’ is a country song set in the world of streaming algorithms and re-read text messages. When I wrote it, I was thinking a lot about how technology and romance can feed and battle each other at the same time. Sending a song to a crush is obviously one of life’s purest joys but what does it mean when the algorithm plays it back to you later? Can you still call it a sign? I was an MSN Messenger teenager so there have always been screens in my romances – screens as a connector and amplifier as well as a barrier, and ‘Database Blues’ is me owning up to my own complicity in that.”

Tenderness was born out of a tough storm of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Young began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. “I was having a hard old time but it was also strangely beautiful,” she says. “There’s something about that space of grief that is very tender. There was a lot of sadness, but also a sweetness and openness to the world. You feel things deeply but you’re also gentle with people.”

In August 2020, during that “weird window” of the pandemic where lockdown eased up enough for a trip to the seaside, or across London, Young visited producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon) at his Greenwich studio. In two days, the pair recorded eight demos with no pressure or plan. “It was like a day trip to the land of music,” she recalls. Over the next few years, around lockdowns and tours and day jobs, those demos quietly transformed into True.

True is a solo album in name, but a communal one in spirit. Longtime collaborators appear throughout: Peggy Sue’s Clay Slade and Olly Joyce, La Luz’s Marian Li-Pino, and members of Deep Throat Choir. Backing vocals come from Berlin musicians Martha Rose, Dandy Deniz and Benjamin Gregory, and the album’s finishing touches – strings and synths — were added by producer Chloe Kraemer. Young comments “One of the most joyful things about doing a solo record has been needing and wanting and being able to invite so many different people to play on it. It feels very beautiful to me that so many of the people I’ve made music with are on the album.”

Tenderness
True
tracklist
Amorphous Sounds

1. Saturday Morning
2. The Salt Flats
3. True
4. Touchscreen
5. We’ll Always Have Paris 1919 (YouTube)
6. Peacetime
7. Database Blues
8. Day of Atonement
9. Heat Wave Love Song
10. Playing ‘Country Roads’

pre-order True by Tenderness HERE