The new single from Florida-born musician Gatlin opens with the kind of piano refrain that Radiohead built their song Codex around. The sound hints at an emotional depth but wrapped in a kind of aloofness, the glassy sound evoking the sense of your ennui getting squeegeed off the windscreen of life. You don’t have the time to stop and unpack your emotional baggage because you’ll just end up missing your damn flight.
This is all an appropriate feeling for a song that is entirely concerned with those moments where you do, ultimately, unpack your shit. Gatlin’s piano playing might be trying to keep things moving along, but her vocal isn’t having any of it. She refuses to be silenced, describing how she is trying her best, but ultimately feels struck by a confrontation with her father ‘in front of a Soho House valet’. Gatlin goes on to acknowledge, ‘it would be more tragic if it didn’t sound so LA’. Side-note: the fact a Soho House, a kind of hipster institution born out of central London’s historic and tightly packed streets, has a valet anywhere sounds ridiculous to my ears. Perhaps that is half the point. So LA, in multiple ways.
Regardless, Gatlin briefly acknowledges , potentially, her father may have had a point, before apologising for the general discomfort caused by describing her emotional drama to us all. In an age where we are all often processing our own (sometimes self-inflicted) trauma, I think this is a common experience — back to my analogy, we are unpacking our baggage on the side of the road, causing the passing traffic so slow down and make room. It is difficult to know whether it is the self-processing here that is helping, or just the act of unveilling our deepest anxieties that enables us to move on. And with that, Gatlin’s depressed-yet-hauntingly-beautiful vocal is gradually accompanied by additional instrumentation — the reassurance of a burden shared, as a guitar, bass and eventually drums join her, carrying her emotional weight to a place where she can let it all go.
The heaviness described and depicted through Soho House Valet stems from Gatlin’s experience of being the eldest sibling, something her forthcoming debut album focuses on. Describing the song, Gatlin says:
‘I wrote Soho House Valet after my parents had come to visit my sister and I in Los Angeles and my father and I got in a fight right outside of the Soho House in Downtown LA. It was one of the most vulnerable things I’ve ever written. As the eldest daughter, I’ve always felt like I had to be strong and never burden anyone…but digging through stuff I never expected to share and then sharing this song anyway started a healing process.’
Soho House Valet is out now, and Gatlin’s debut album, The Eldest Daughtet, is due on 3 October via Dualtone Records.