Kathryn Williams - Songs from the Novel Greatest Hits (2017)

Mercury-nominated singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has announced that she will release a ‘soundtrack album’ to a brand new novel by best-selling author Laura Barnett, that follows the life of a fictional singer. Greatest Hits, the hotly-anticipated follow-up to Barnett’s novel The Versions of Us, will be published alongside the brand new album by Kathryn Williams – Songs from the Novel Greatest Hits. The original songs are written by Kathryn Williams, with lyrics by Laura Barnett and Kathryn Williams, and will be released through One Little Indian.

Laura Barnett’s acclaimed debut novel The Versions of Us was a Number One Bestseller and has sold over 200,000 copies in the UK alone, while Kathryn Williams enjoyed huge success with her Sylvia Plath tribute album Hypoxia and her most recent collaborative album with jazz musician Anthony Kerr – Resonator. The artist teamed up with Romeo Stodart of The Magic Numbers to produce Songs from the Novel Greatest Hits, while his sister Michele Stodart contributed instrumentation to the record. The siblings also both contributed their signature vocals to the richly diverse album.

The novel Greatest Hits tells the story of Cass Williams, a fictional musical artist who enjoyed huge success from the early '70s, only to retire mysteriously at the height of her fame. Two decades later, she is spending a single day in her recording studio, picking out tracks for a very personal Greatest Hits album. Each chapter of Greatest Hits opens with one of these songs and takes the reader back through Cass’s life, from her childhood, through her earliest days as a singer, to the terrible crisis that caused her to flee her own life. The accompanying album by Kathryn Williams brings each song chosen for Cass’s Greatest Hits record to life, with every track written and recorded in the style of the corresponding era.