Dan Willson is Scotland’s acclaimed singer songwriter Withered Hand. He has released three albums and a number of EPs over the last 15 years and has toured internationally, amassing a devoted following while staying close to his DIY roots in the underground music scene.

Kathryn Williams is a Mercury Music prize nominated English singer songwriter who has released 16 albums. She had collaborated with poet Dame Carol Ann Duffy, author Laura Barnett and written songs with Paul Weller, Neill Maccoll and Michele and Romeo Stodart, to name just a few. She has written a novel The Ormering Tide, hosts her own podcast Before the Light Goes Out and tutors at the Arvon and Moniack Mhor Foundations.

Kathryn and Dan met in 2019 in a Spiegeltent in Edinburgh at a Book Festival event curated by Hollie McNish and Michael Pedersen. They both think it’s weird that they hadn’t met before as they both share many of the same friends in music, James Yorkston, Rachel Sermanni, Kathryn Joseph etc. Sometimes they think that they might have met at a Fence Collective festival years ago. At least Kath thinks she remembers Dan but Dan doesn’t seem to remember much.

Their co-writing started when Kathryn wrote a tweet to Dan asking, “What kind of songs would we write together and what would they sound like?” or something to that effect. Dan was convinced she had sent it to the wrong person. But she hadn’t. Curious to meet and find out, Kath travelled up to Edinburgh where Dan lives. They wrote two songs together and then Dan travelled down to Newcastle where Kath lives, and they wrote more.

Then covid hit, which prompted the technophobes to write and meet online. They both also took to live stream concerts on Instagram. By the end of lockdown, they had a whole album of songs. The initial premise and starting point for them both was discussions and open conversations on bereavement. They had both recently lost friends who were also in the public eye and talked about the strange place between personal loss and the communal grieving of a public figure.

A friendship developed alongside the writing of the album. Before the time came to record the album, Dan wrote his first solo album in ten years released early 2023 on Reveal Records. Dan says that the writing and the friendship with Kath rejuvenated his own song writing process enough to be able to do this. Dan says of the collaborative process “We talk and spend time together and then its almost like the next time we sit down to write, it’s like a synthesis of late-night kitchen conversations become distilled into the songs. It’s hard to separate whose done what and where the songs sprang from.” Kath says “yeah…what he said.”