HITTING THE RIGHT NOTES
The story of a musician looking back over her career prompted an inspiring creative collaboration between bestselling novelist Laura Barnett and Mercury-nominated singer songwriter Kathryn Williams, as Tina Jackson discovers
Kathryn Williams, as Tina Jackson
STAR INTERVIEW
Greatest Hits, Laura Barnett’s follow-up to 2015’s The Versions of Us, is not just a terrific novel in its own right. Telling the story of fictional singer-songwriter Cass as she looks back over her life, it has also been the basis of an exceptional collaborative project exploring the relationship between words and music with real-life singersongwriter Kathryn Williams, whose album Songs from the Novel Greatest Hits features sixteen songs, ostensibly written by Cass, one for each of the sixteen chapters in the book.
‘I wanted to write a novel about someone looking back over their whole life and it also came out of frustration that there aren’t many good novels about rock music,’ says Laura. ‘So if you want to read that book you have to write it yourself. And I had this crazy idea about wanting a soundtrack for the book.’
In 2015, with Laura deep in the writing of Greatest Hits, Mercurynominated Kathryn Williams released Hypoxia, an album of songs inspired by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. ‘I heard Kathryn on the Cerys Matthews show on the radio, with Hypoxia, and she was obviously thinking about words and music,’ said Laura. ‘So I emailed her record company.’