David Kitt - 20 (2021)

10 + 10 = 20. David Kitt has travelled a long and scenic route since his 2000 debut Small Moments. That album and its critically and commercially successful follow-up, The Big Romance, saw him marketed as a kind of thinking man’s David Gray, but his talent as a songwriter and his unwillingness to be pigeonholed meant that he was always meant for bigger, or at least more interesting, things. Even in those early days, he was unflinching, inventive and always open to new musical technologies – despite a major label deal with Universal, his music was closer in spirit to Beth Orton’s collaborations with William Orbit than to chart-friendly troubadours like Gray.

20 is essentially a career retrospective, but instead of going down the easy route of a Best Of album, Kitt has lovingly rerecorded a score of his favourite songs, something that was easier said than done: the project had to be put on hold twice after recording sessions in Paris and Dublin. After a swift relocation to the County Kerry countryside, the project found its feet again, and the resulting collection has a fittingly homespun feel.

One record, even a two-part, twenty-song monster like this one, is never going to be able to fully encapsulate the career of an artist as varied and subtle as David Kitt. But that is part of the joy of a record like 20. It acts as both an endpoint in a particular phase of a storied career and a starting point for those wishing to explore that career further. On top of that, it is a stunning musical document in its own right.