A Confused Point Of View

Kate Bollinger “Who Am I But Someone”

Kate Bollinger’s music often feels very light, both in the sense of weightlessness and illumination. This is a lot of the appeal of her music, which mostly feels like it was created specifically to sound wonderful on a breezy spring afternoon. But it’s also a little ironic as Bollinger’s lyrics are consistently very neurotic, not so much that she seems cripplingly neurotic, but definitely like someone who overthinks a lot of things and is prone to getting deep in existential thought spirals. “Who Am I But Someone” is more in the latter category, a song in which Bollinger sounds fairly serene as she considers why she feels stuck in repetitive self-defeating behaviors. “Who am I but someone who will resign to the comforts of who I always was” is definitely a sentiment I can relate to, but I’m intrigued by how even the more depressive lines are expressed as if in a state of total emotional equilibrium. She’s not coming at this from a state of angst, it’s more like half meditative half analytical. She’s singing about inertia, but she sounds like someone who’s identified a problem and is actually fixing it through cognitive behavior therapy pop music.

Buy it from Bandcamp.