We’ve featured a number of singles from koleżanka in the run up to the release of new album Zone 2, each in some way exploring a hand injury and subsequent slow recovery which put Kristina Moore’s very ability to make music in jeopardy for a considerable period of time. “Zone 2 is an anatomical term used to describe the area between the distal palmar crease to the middle of the finger in which a flexor tendon injury can occur,” Moore explains of the title. “Because of the increased risk of complications and generally unpredictable post-op outcome, it is also referred to as ‘No Man’s Land’.” Written in the first week post-surgery, ‘Levers and Pulleys‘ serves as a flagship track for the album, a song “stripped back to the harsh and tender truths as demanded by the limitations at its point of origin,” as we put it, which “plays like recovery unfolding in real time. A process not necessarily as joyous nor neatly linear as we might hope, rather something won hour by hour, day by day as the cells replicate and repair themselves, and the body relearns the world according to its new shape.”
The circuitous nature of healing featured on ‘Lessons in Textiles‘ too. A single which draws on Moore’s interest in knitting “to weave a metaphor for the personal transformations which so often accompany grief,” as we wrote, “namely the technique of unravelling (or ‘frogging’) a knit in order to rework the stitches, the song describing a person not only undone by loss but slowly fashioned into something new.” Then came ‘Single Wooden Bullet‘, a picture of life after death, be that figurative or literal, inspired by Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, which posits that only through embracing imperfection might we persevere beyond an apparent end.
With the release of Zone 2 mere days away, koleżanka has shared final single ‘Hook, Line, Sinker!’ in preparation, and the track is a fitting embodiment of the determination and defiance which ultimately allowed Moore to reclaim music as her own. Because while her surgeon said she would likely never play guitar again, in reality, Moore was back on the horse as soon as her cast was removed. The guitar on ‘Hook, Line, Sinker!’ sounds exactly like an artist given a new lease of life on the instrument, pushing itself with extra swagger and intricacy just because such things are possible.
But more than an exhibition of a talent regained, the track is also a rare love song from koleżanka, reflecting on the tenderness inherent within the care of another, something highlighted when our capabilities are taken from us. “[‘Hook, Line, Sinker!’] is notably one of the only love songs I’ve ever written,” Moore explained in an Instagram post. “A reflection on the day to day routines between my partner and I, our coming together and coming apart in a way that feels like the ecosystem to our home. He had been helping me do such simple things at the time that I couldn’t do, like cut a vegetable for me or tie my shoes. I was finding new realms of gratitude in these new ways of being cared for.”