Following an opposite path to my own Lerryn was born in Hackney and relocated to the West Country. After her parents split up, Lerryn’s father would come over to teach her to play guitar on one of the guitars from her grandmother’s Spanish imported-guitars stall in Camden Market. From then on she was hooked, music became an expression that stayed with her through an art degree, immersion in the New York spoken-word scene, and ultimate return to London, when she became a founding member of Peckham band, Dead Arm. Although the band have now called it a day, various members still appear as collaborators on Lerryn’s new solo project, and her debut EP, As A Mother.

As A Mother is a record of questioning, both a record about motherhood and yet one that is also far more universal than that. The themes she speaks to across the record are surely familiar to all, touching on ideas of love, comfort, home, and crucially how they all change over time, how with time and age we adjust our desires and priorities. How through loss and fresh beginnings we are changed, and the world around us looks different, never to quite go back to how it looked before.

Across the five tracks, Lerryn explores all aspects of life, from the, “unfathomable grief of watching your children get old” on It Won’t Be Long through to You Are My Love, a song about life events expanding your capacity for love, written in the stolen moments Lerryn found to herself on their first family “holiday” to France. These musings are set to a shifting pallet of musical influences, from the bassy pulse of the previously mentioned You Are My Love through to the X-Ray Spex-like sing-speak of Be Brilliant To Me. Particularly wonderful is It Won’t Be Long, a deliciously warm flourish of Rhodes-likes keyboards and shuffling drums that feels like the middle ground between This Is The Kit and Pentangle. It’s a song of endings and beginnings, loss and gain, about time passing in its own weirdly, bittersweet non-linear fashion, shaping us as it does, like a river scarring the landscape on its path to the sea, “it won’t be long now, it won’t be long, it won’t be long”.

With the EP out today via Sheffield label Redundant Span, Lerryn takes us on a track-by-track journey through the songs that make up this most remarkable and beautiful of EPs.

I spent years with some of these songs in my bedroom, after my kids had gone to bed. It felt soothing, singing them, in the knowledge that there were words for this magnitudinal shift of self that so many others knew before me. 

I have been friends with Liam, Kenny and Josh (the band) for nearly 10 years, because of the cafe I set up in my early twenties. I asked Liam from Mellah if he wanted to produce it, and the others agreed soon after. Liam knows me very well and this helped when it came to putting sounds to my words. We made a good team. They seemed genuinely pleased to come together and make these songs. And the friendship meant that I could trust them to hold the emotional space in the studio that this record needed. 

You Are My Love

I stayed at a house in France, it had a guitar in one of the rooms. I had been married to my husband for a few weeks, and we took our 11 month old daughter on our first holiday. A word that no longer should be the word for the trips that you take small children on. I sat by the pool at one of the blissful nap times. I chose four chords on a loop and wrote this song. I usually write the lyrics before in a poem/ diary entry, but this one I wrote with the guitar. 

I took my melody to the studio and I explained to the band to imagine that the sun was shining, they had just lit a cigarette and were sitting on some hot concrete. It was the first song I had written with a band in years, everyone played beautifully and I knew that they knew that I knew that we were onto something good. 

It is about the profound effect that being in love has on you, and a reminder to just soak yourself in that feeling sometimes. 

Be Brilliant to Me 

This is my favorite song on the EP. I wrote this on a bus, humming the potential tune in my head, a few days before I took it into the studio.  It is about releasing the memories of giving birth through movement. It is about dancing to a rhythm after your body has been a vessel. Liam had the idea to put that wonky synth on like an irregular loud heartbeat. He shoved a piece of cardboard onto the key so it stayed down while the rest of us could focus on our parts. His drums, Kenny’s bass line and Josh’s strumming nylon string guitar merged like honey, enough to prop me up to sing about reconnecting to a body that had been lost in the metamorphosis of motherhood. 

It Won’t Be Long

I have never played this song without feeling exactly how I did when it was written. It is about the unfathomable grief of watching your children get old. I wrote it on my son’s first birthday. It had three chords when I brought it to the band. It still does have three chords. 

This one came together live in the studio similar to ‘You Are My Love’. It hasn’t changed that much since the first time I played it, that’s how I wanted it. 

As A Mother (feat Naima Bock)

I can’t really remember writing this song. I think I may have blocked it out. I found it really difficult and really emotional to write, produce and to sing. It reflects the dyadic opposing forces experienced in motherhood. Joy and despair, presence and distraction, feeling of belonging, feeling of being lost. Motherhood cuts you in two: your past self and your current self and thinking about these two identities can be painful. In terms of the production, this was mostly me and Liam working and reworking this, he actually sent me out the studio to go and have a pint on my own because my head was getting too wrapped up in it. This is where I learnt that emotion can be trained to push your voice rather than restrain it. I came up with the idea that I wanted the song to have a beat, specifically with reference to a garage rhythm. I was laughed at a bit, but eventually Liam got it and he played with this idea. The process of working out this jarring beat with the melody felt parallel to the oxymoron themes in the song. Naima then came in,  she was often in the studio opposite, and we worked out some really nice vocals that enveloped the song well.  I wanted to have the depth of her voice to act as a female holding on the track, this felt important. 

A House

Written and recorded the second time it was sung. We wanted some relief in the studio from the writing of ‘As A Mother’ which we were all getting stuck on. We began to find a flow with a sound, and I pulled out my phone with my most recent thing written on notes. It was an advert I had written on facebook to find childcare for my kids that term and collaged the words together. It was a drum machine and the wurlitzer and Kenny’s bass (I can get very romantic about Kenny’s bass lines). So I sang over the melody the band were going on, Liam set up the microphones and we recorded, it felt good to work quickly like that! 

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As A Mother is out now via Redundant Span Records. For more information on Lerryn visit