Hello, my name is Katrin-Merili and I am an Estonian singer and songwriter based in Paris. Beautiful Things is my first EP that I released recently. It’s a personal one to me, all of the songs and stories are real parts of my life. Some songs were born in their first form ten years ago and some just came to life recently, but each one describes an experience I went through.
I met the producer of this EP, Sacha Arnaud, in Paris through my manager at the time and our connection quickly felt so easy and creative. Working with him on these songs and choosing the musicians that would bring my musical vision to life was a pleasure.
I come from a jazz background and I was certain I wanted live instrumentation, to record all together in the studio so we could see each other and feel each other’s energy. I also wanted to give some creative freedom to the band to hear out their ideas and I trusted them to feel the story and bring their unique magic to it.
That’s why most of the songs were recorded in one take and kept that way from beginning to end. For me, the most important was to capture the right energy and emotion in that moment between us all, when we felt the most aligned and honest to each other.
I chose “Hold My Body” to be the first song as it’s a love letter to my relationship of 11 years that started as long-distance. It’s a song about desperately wanting to be with someone, to feel them close, yet only seeing them through a computer screen.
I was inspired by the sacrifices that people are willing to make to be together, despite distances, and somehow knowing in your gut that this person is worth waiting for. I wanted the instrumentation to feel like spring, light and feminine, to keep that emotion and thrill of falling in love, of butterflies in your stomach.
In the beginning, I planned for a shorter radio version but once in the studio, we all improvised this beautiful outro together, it was pure magic that happened in that moment and we kept all of it in full exactly as it bloomed in that moment.
“Beautiful Things” is a track that reflects on the ways two imperfect people try to stay together despite their past traumas and self-destructive patterns. How being in love can bring out the most vulnerable pieces of ourselves and the fear of hurt can affect us to sabotage the relationship and make each other suffer. I was heavily influenced by Robert Glasper and his piano playing at the time when I wrote it.
“Girl In The Mirror” is a song about a difficult time in my life. I wrote it while my mother was battling breast cancer. It changed me as a person, as a woman, the way I saw beauty and strength and my own body. Even if loving myself is still an ongoing process, I changed a lot during that time and the emotion in this song is still very strong to me.
“Overjoyed” is a joyful feel-good track and I wanted it to have a soulful warm sound that brings instant happiness like Marvin Gaye or Donny Hathaway. I wanted a wurly sound and airy choir, groovy bass. In the production process, we worked on mixing the old-school feel with more of a modern sound and this song took us the longest production-wise to get the right feeling.
The song itself was born with such ease, during a strong feeling of happiness I felt after helping someone. The joy in that moment was so explosive that I wrote this song fully in a few hours. It’s the fastest I have ever written a song, like it was made for me already and I just picked it from some cloud above, like connecting with a higher force.
I wanted to finish the EP with a track that shows another side of me. For “Dangerous” I wanted it to have a modern RnB sound in terms of vocal and musical production yet still a bit jazzy but also something you’d want to dance and feel sexy to.
Sacha did such a beautiful job with the production of this song, and how he captured my vision, yet took it to new levels. I am still very proud of this one, and don’t get tired of dancing to it in my living room.
Listen to Beautiful Things below, and stream it elsewhere here.
