Feature: Geowulf – The Child
The Child was born from a period in which Geowulf (Star Kendrick) had to take stock of her life and make some hard decisions about what she wanted to do with her future.
Referring both to Kendrick’s new baby, as well as the child she herself once was, and all that child endured to get to where Kendrick is today. “This album was a lot of me trying to work out what my new life would look like as a mother, and, through that, processing stuff from when I was a child,” she says. “I feel like this album is my most personal lyrically – I’m talking about becoming a mum, as well as my own family.”
Star Kendrick uses her fractured childhood as a lens through which to explore the kind of mother she wants to be. One such song is “Stay Baby,” a gorgeous track written from the perspective of Kendrick’s mother. With her trademark openness, Kendrick imagines what her experience of pregnancy may have been like, conjuring a finely tuned character study in the process. “I liked that the chorus is a different world from the verse – it changes tone a bit, asking this person to stay and be around,” she says. “It was written from the perspective of my mum and imagining what she must have been going through when she had me.”
Elsewhere on the record, Kendrick ponders whether her dreams of success in music will always be at odds with motherhood. On the dazed lullaby “Dreaming,” she asks: “If I could let myself dream, would anybody stop me?” –thereby imagining a world in which women aren’t hamstrung by patriarchal impulses to make women choose between a
career or having a child. “I wrote this before I had the baby, and I had sort of been on the fence about whether I wanted a child. On this song, I was working it out – is a child compatible with my career?”
These unanswerable questions swirl around The Child, and although Kendrick rarely comes up with solid answers, there’s comfort and intense power in the fact that she’s asking them at all. Resolute and rippling with the kind of confidence an artist can only gain by striking out alone, The Child heralds a new era of Geowulf, and of Star
Kendrick.
Geowulf‘s latest release The Child is available to stream now via Nettwerk.
