After releasing her debut album Not A Proper Girl in the afterglow of Lyttelton’s creative boom, Kate Owen is coming out of exile with a merry romp about realising you’ve lost yourself.
Don't be fooled by this song's title. Owen’s Little Flowers has a sinister side, fully realised in the single’s body snatcher music video.
After catching the attention of New Zealand’s music media with Not A Proper Girl, Owen’s album release tour was stopped in its tracks by the first COVID lockdown in March 2020. Then, just as suddenly, Owen’s long term relationship with Lyttelton abruptly ended.
Lyttelton has been heralded as a creative hub, but for Owen the anarchistic creativity of the port town she had fallen in love with had morphed into a cultural clique she didn’t fit.
“I broke up with Lyttelton in 2020 after releasing that it was an unrequited love” says Owen. “I wrote Little Flowers to try and describe the realisation that I had become a silhouette of that little town, and needed to find me again”.
Little Flowers was recorded at the renowned Christchurch studio LOHO, under the watchful eye of producer Adam Hogan with multi-instrumentalist Thomas Isbister.
Little Flowers is musically sunny, which Owen skillfully juxtaposes with dark lyrics that explore the macabre side of allowing a place to become an inseparable part of your identity.
“I really felt like I was falling when I left Lyttelton,” Owen says. “I think that’s what most people feel like when something they believed was forever ends”.
Little Flowers swells with layers of guitars, synths and drums (everything played by Isbister) and Owen’s vocals skillfully harmonised by Hogan, and you would be forgiven for thinking it was a happy song.
The darker meaning is realised fully in the music video directed and shot by Hogan’s LORE films with long time collaborator Soane Pamatangi.