This Is The Kit Tells us About Every Song on Great New Album ‘Careful Of Your Keepers’
Not many songwriters can boldly quote The Simpsons with a straight face, but Kate Stables is one of them. It’s right there in the chorus of “Inside Outside,” a song about longing, change and choice: “bite off as much as you can chew,” she sings before opening up Ralph Wiggum’s Valentine’s Day card. “I chew chew choose you.” Mastication is a key metaphor on Careful of Your Keepers, Stables’ sixth album as This is the Kit that examines relationships, who we choose to be with, how that all changes over time, and how big of a bite we allow ourselves to take. Stables’ always empathetic lyricism is at the center of This is The Kit, which she surrounds with sinewy, proggy folk. Her bandmates, including bassist Rozi Plain, guitarist Neil Smith, and drummer Jamie Whitby-Coles, are all highly skilled musicians capable of pulling off off these parts that, like Stables’ words, are complex but easily digestible. Careful feels just a bit bigger that previous albums, perhaps due to Gruff Rhys, who was tapped as producer and helps them add horns (flugelhorn, bassoon) and other elements to the mix. Arrangements on the gorgeous title track, “Scabby Head and Legs” (which references another cartoon, Bluey), and “Doomed Or More Doomed” are windswept and subtly spectacular, but lines like “this is your ‘how shit is it’ measuring stick” will stay with you long after the music fades.
Kate was nice enough to walk us through Careful Of Your Keepers track-by-track, and she brings her poetic style here, too. Read that, and listen to the album, below.
THIS IS THE KIT – ‘CAREFUL OF YOUR KEEPERS’ TRACK-BY-TRACK
01 GOODBYE BITE
a presence you feel that is with you wherever you go.
Putting things in your mouth. Biting someone on the shins.
Deciding things are ok.
Deciding you’ll be ok whilst acknowledging that things are pretty bad.
Superstitions. Social norms. Other people’s expectations.
Dying and death.
It is a choice.
Choosing to see.
And to be honest about what you see and how you feel.
What is our frame of reference for when things aren’t ok?
What do we compare them to?
What do we use to gauge how unbearable a situation is?
How can we tell?
Raising an arm in solidarity with everyone else who is struggling.
Giving people a break because you never know what hard stuff they’re going through.
People are good at hiding it. we spend lifetimes learning how to hide how hard it is.
This song was at one point going to be called measuring stick. One of the recurring themes in this record is our tendency to measure and compare and quantify. When I started writing this song it was about more external topics. Politics, global torment. But then slowly it shrunk in to think more about more personal politics and internal climate change. Emotional change. As well as planetary/global worldwide human species induced political turmoil and change.
What do we use as the control test?
What tools do we have to measure how bad something is? A situation? Someone’s behaviour? A year?
But it’s also about living through the difficulties and letting go of the sharp edges.
The teeth. The painful bite.
Also, I liked the idea or a goodbye bite as in a goodbye kiss. Maybe how vampires say goodbye?
02 INSIDE OUTSIDE
what makes things happen? How much choice do we have?
Electricity and chemistry that is out of our control?
Chewing.
Choosing.
Internal forces or external ones?
Do we just behave the way people expect us to behave?
Or do they pre-empt what’s happening? Before it’s happened? Because they can see it in us before we know it ourselves?
Big change that has been brewing for longer than we realise.
Were we just ignoring it?
Was it so deeply buried? Or did we see it all along but chose to ignore it?
How much does anything change? Or is it just the way we see it that changes?
Oops more questions than answers there. But that’s pretty normal for my songs I think.
03 TAKE YOU TO SLEEP
when you know that someone just needs to sleep to rest to be in a safe place. and there’s nothing anyone can do to help them get there.
The feeling of just wanting to do whatever you can for someone for things to be better.
That it’s none of your business.
It’s none of their business.
None of the business of anyone except you and this one person.
Big letting go. Bigger than you’ve ever known.
04 MORE CHANGE
more it stays the same.
Sometimes it feels like everything has completely changed and then it just feels like it’s always been like that. And always will be like that.
the more things change the more they actually stay the same.
The one constant is change.
Change is the only thing we can be sure of.
Who is who.
The people that become important to us and the way they become important.
Phases that come and go? Or don’t go?
The friends we need. We need our friends. We need to remember to be in the world.
I love it when Gru says “lightbulb.”
Realising that things come and go and pass and are born and then die.
The good it does us to hold hands with someone.
The tearing in two of a person and a heart.
05 THIS IS WHEN THE SKY GETS BIG
there is a park near where I live that is one of my favourite places to go in Paris.
All sorts of people use the park for all sorts of things.
Human activity at its most beautiful and touching and sad and scary and heart-breaking.
And all under a really big amount of sky. Which is rare in Paris.
a rare place where the sky feels pretty big.
It’s right next to the train lines that go to and from the east.
One of the things I love about Paris is that you can get the train to so many places. No need to bother with airports or leaving the ground.
Looking at the sky from the ground.
Where people live and get on with their lives together and apart.
I originally wrote this song for a friend of mine called Aaron Sewards who does amazing watercolour paintings. He had asked me about the idea of a joint project where I would write some songs about some of my favourite places and then he would make an accompanying painting of the place. Still in the pipes!
I remember being in this park when Hollande was elected (replacing Sarkozy) and when it was announced the people living in the flats that overlooked the park all flung their windows open and started cheering and shouting. Then I walked home and everyone was high-fiving each other in the street.
It was an amazing moment of hope and optimism.
The people who use this park.
The big tables
The grass.
The fitness equipment.
The community snack hatch.
06 SCABBY HEAD AND LEGS
there was a pigeon last year who made its nest on one of the windows of our flat.
It laid two eggs but only one of them hatched.
The pigeon itself seemed actually to be in pretty good nick. Not very scabby at all.
I’m often pretty scabby though. And life gets scabby.
And pigeons in general are prone to be pretty scabby. Heads and legs.
I saw an episode of Bluey once where Bingo crawls under a bench after their dad had been playing a game that was a bit too rough and she’d got hurt. and it really struck a chord.
I’m prone to crawling under benches. There’s a really great Instagram account called ‘rate this bench’ by a guy who goes around sitting on and then rating benches in various different places.
I love it. I love benches. They’re a good symbol of socialism and public space and community but also solitude and time passing.
There’s a tree I think of when I sing this song that is on St. Catherine’s hill in Winchester., where I grew up. A good climber.
Usually everyone and no one is to blame. So there’s no point trying to work out who and what is to blame.
Things are how they are and they hurt and they break you and other people and what you shared.
You shouldn’t steal eggs from nests.
Ledges are dangerous places.
Carrying fragile things is dangerous.
Holding onto what you love is dangerous.
Letting go of what you love is dangerous. And hurts.
Choosing what to celebrate and remember.
Choosing to love and send people on with your blessings.
More Choices. More Choosing.
I also think of Scabby Head and Scabby Legs as being two different characters in this story.
Maybe one of them is the pigeon on a ledge in a very urban setting and the other one is in a next up a tree out in the country? Or maybe the tree leads up to the ledge. These are all things I think about when I sing this one.
07 CAREFUL OF YOUR KEEPERS
the things you keep. But also the people that keep you.
Careful as in look after but also careful as in be careful. Watch out for.
Stamina. How long you can put up with a struggle without any rest.
Treading water.
Rafts on water. The noises they make. They way they move.
Away from each other.
Or two the edges. If there are any edges?
The way a tree will envelop railings or a fence that was put up next to it. Long after it. And will be gobbled up eventually. Nature takes back.
Old age as a gift and also a burden.
The person that looks after you and holds you.
The roles that change. The carer becomes the cared for.
To keep swimming. To keep treading water.
The fragility of wooden structures that have been set loose on a huge body of water.
The “children of the open sea” chapter in ‘the farthest shore’ by ursula k leguin.
At the mercy of the elements.
The solidity of wooden structures that have been set loose on a huge body of water.
We do heal. And often it’s with the help of others.
We will heal.
08 DOOMED OR MORE DOOMED
this feels like the choice we’re all being faced with at the moment. Doomed? Or more doomed?
Trying to work out which is the lesser of two evils?
The least damaging method of destruction?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions?
What we take with us? What is travelling light? What is being prepared?
How much should/do we take on/take with us?
Before the buckeroo spring is triggered and everything gets lobbed all over the place and we have to start stacking it up to carry again, if we’re lucky enough to get another go.
09 STUCK IN A ROOM
we all get stuck. And it’s hard to get unstuck.
When I sing this song I often think of certain bits from ‘Masters of Atlantis’ by Charles Portis.
Behavioural patterns. Nervous ticks. Stuck in society’s expectations and social norm standards.
Those of us to have a room are lucky to even have a room. But we need to be careful how we use it and how it serves us. The need for a healthy relationship with the different rooms we inhabit.
It’s good for us to exists in different rooms, not just the one.
Getting out. Getting back into the world. Deciding to ignore what other people want you to do or ways they think you should behave.
10 DIBS
We don’t own people.
And we don’t know what’s going to happen.
But loving people means letting them grow and go with our blessing.
Getting a shock so shocking that it restarts your heart.
You can feel your extremities again.
But with the feeling coming back comes feeling pain.
How do you look after someone who is leaving and loosing. How do you help each other.
How do you do the honourable and right thing whilst hurting as few people as possible.
How many is as few as possible?
Looking back at what you’ve built and acknowledging that it is enormous and beautiful and bigger than the sum of its parts.
And that we don’t own each other’s hearts.
We just want the people we love to be ok. Better than ok.
To thrive and to fly.
We don’t own things or people.
An attempt at a peace offering.
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This Is the Kit will be on tour this fall beginning in NYC at Le Poisson Rouge on 10/11.