Digital communication reinforces this dynamic through its structure. Messages arrive with delays, responses remain unpredictable, and interaction unfolds in fragments that extend beyond the moment itself. Neuroscientific research links these patterns to dopamine-related processes associated with anticipation and reward. Emotional engagement is sustained through cycles of waiting, rereading, and mentally returning to the same exchanges. Anyone who has ever reread the same message ten times knows exactly how this works. The connection exists not only in contact, but in the intervals that surround it.

It is within this environment that Katy Beth Young shapes True, her debut album as Tenderness. The record emerged during a period marked by isolation, a long-distance relationship, and the loss of her father. These conditions form the emotional ground of the album, where presence becomes unstable and experience shifts inward. In conversation, Young describes this state with clarity: “Fantasy intensifies feelings.” The phrase reflects a process in which imagination participates directly in how connection is formed and sustained.

Technology appears throughout the album as part of lived experience rather than as a distant theme. Calls, messages, and digital traces exist alongside memory, physical longing, and grief. Different forms of presence overlap without fully replacing one another. A voice memo carries weight similar to a physical encounter. An unsent message becomes part of the relationship itself. The songs move through these layers, holding together closeness and distance, immediacy and delay, clarity and projection within the same emotional space.

Grief introduces another dimension to this experience. Loss removes physical presence, yet connection continues to exist in a transformed form. Psychological frameworks such as “continuing bonds” describe how relationships persist through memory and internal experience. In a digital context, this process acquires additional depth, as messages, recordings, and traces remain accessible. The boundary between presence and absence becomes less defined, allowing emotional experience to continue within that ambiguity.

Songwriting, in this context, functions as a way of structuring these layered states. Young approaches it as a process of articulation, giving shape to experiences that resist direct explanation. Research on expressive practices suggests that music and writing help organize internal experience through rhythm, repetition, and form. On True, this process becomes audible. The songs hold tension without resolving it, allowing different emotional states to coexist without collapsing into a single meaning.

Our conversation with Young unfolds from this point, moving through questions of digital intimacy, grief, and the role of imagination in shaping emotional experience today. The discussion reveals a landscape where connection is formed through attention, sustained through absence, and continuously reinterpreted over time.

— Katy, you describe grief as a state that holds both pain and a strange tenderness. At what point did writing these songs shift from simply coping to something transformative? Was there a moment when music stopped being therapy — or became something more complicated?

Katy Beth Young: My experience of grief was definitely very tender - painful and loving at once. I know it’s not the same for everyone but it made me very open-hearted I think. Songwriting has always been more than one thing for me - introspection and catharsis and escapism all at once.

To the extent that it’s like therapy (or is therapeutic?), I’d say it’s more in terms of understanding and discovery than coping. Although I do find writing and playing soothing. There’s a relief in it, in the making and the finishing and also in the sense
of clarity - like I’ve been struggling to explain myself and through a song suddenly
I make sense, even if often only to myself.

— Throughout the album, technology sits alongside deeply personal emotions — calls, algorithms, messages, screens. Do you feel the digital environment today intensifies our feelings, or does it make them more blurred and distant?

Katy Beth Young: Definitely both! The thing with the screens in relation to romance is that they leave a lot of room for fantasy and fantasy intensifies feelings (at least in my experience.) One of the relationships that is at the centre of the album was a long-distance one and it was very beautiful and intimate both because of and despite the technology. Maybe it’s about attention? Any time our attention is split the emotions, and the people, are more distant, and the tools aren’t made to encourage our undivided attention. But when I'm in love or crushing the technology is just another way of having more of that person. At the same time sometimes with all relationships I really do need physical closeness and the screens just won’t do. I’ve recently realised that texting isn’t giving me joy and connection in the way it used to, I'm trying to make more phone calls.

— When an album grows out of grief, there’s always a risk of becoming fixed in that state — returning to the pain again and again through performance. How do you experience that balance? Does performing these songs help you move through loss, or are there moments when it keeps you inside those emotions?

Katy Beth Young: I’ve thought about the relationship between grief (or sadness more generally) and performance a lot. But actually my fear was sort of the opposite – that once it becomes a performance you lose something. I experienced grief as quite a fragile state, sometimes the most painful moments were the most beautiful because there was a kind of closeness to the person I’d lost. The summer after my Dad died I was often trying to capture and document my grief – it felt somehow like those emotions were the last new memories I would make with him. The song ‘Playing Country Roads’ which is the last one on the album is the most explicitly about that and I ended up using the original voice memo recording of the song because I didn’t want to record it insincerely - to “perform” it. I think now that I've been playing the songs at shows I’ve landed somewhere in the middle though – that songs are rituals, which you repeat, and that they enable you to move through loss and keep some of it alive at once.

— True feels spacious and delicate, yet emotionally intense beneath the surface. Was it a conscious decision to speak about pain quietly? Can quiet music sometimes be more radical in its impact than something louder?

Katy Beth Young: Partly the quietness came from how I was writing the songs, which was at home on my Dad’s old acoustic guitar. That inspires very different sounds and moods in me than being in a practice room or on the electric guitar. Speaking for myself, I know that sometimes loud music can give me something that quiet music cannot and vice versa - both as a musician and as an audience member. Sometimes I need one, sometimes I need the other. (The other day, after I’d read too much news, I had to listen to Payola by Desaparesidos at full volume for an hour, but this morning I treated my melancholy with Adrienne Lenker). But I suppose I think of my voice and my words as my most cherished instruments so I was making an album that would let me speak as loudly and clearly as possible as I could, which was through a quiet album.

— This album was born out of isolation, yet it became deeply collaborative in spirit. What does it mean to share something so personal with other musicians — and with an audience? Does shared creation make it easier to carry what once felt too heavy to hold alone?

Katy Beth Young: I’ve always made music with other people but I’ve always written songs on my own, so in a sense ‘True’ wasn’t so different. The collaboration and community was present very early on in the studio with Euan but yes it can be hard to play something intimate for the first time, especially because I tend towards directness and clarity with my lyrics, so there’s not much to hide behind. The most shy I ever feel on stage is playing a new song but that’s also when the song feels the most alive. It can also be hard to have played it so many times that you forget how intimate it is. In the middle is the best and most nourishing feeling. To be listened to and understood.

What emerges from Young’s reflections is not an attempt to resolve the contradictions she describes, but a willingness to stay inside them. The album does not separate what is real from what is imagined, or what is present from what is absent. Instead, it shows how closely these states are intertwined, especially in a reality shaped by technology, where connection is often experienced through fragments, attention, and memory as much as through physical proximity.

In this context, emotional intensity is no longer tied only to what happens, but to how it is held, revisited, and reinterpreted. Imagination becomes part of the experience itself, extending it, deepening it, and at times making it feel more immediate than reality. At the same time, the need for physical presence does not disappear, creating a tension that remains unresolved, but deeply familiar.

True exists in that space — between closeness and distance, between loss and continuation, between what can be touched and what can only be felt.
Clarity was never the point.
The feeling stays, shifting shape, settling into something that can be heard, repeated, and carried.
That is where the album lives — and where it keeps you.