Song-by-Song ‘In Spite Of Everything, The Stars’ by Lein Sangster

Lein Sangster: “All my life I wanted to have the skill to be able to make music that I could hear in my head.” Photo: Christa Holka

Songs shaped by grief, queer identity, poverty and hope – told with tenderness, humour and clarity from a life survived

Lein Sangster’s debut solo album, In Spite of Everything, The Stars, is a deeply felt work shaped by a lifetime of experience – personal, political, and profoundly human. Known for their earlier work with 80s cult favourites KIT and the experimental Bad Anorak 404, Sangster now steps forward with a collection of songs that weave together jazz, soul, folk, and soundtrack textures to tell stories of grief and joy, childhood poverty, queer identity, and the quiet triumph of becoming oneself. What follows is an intimate look into the people, places and moments behind the music…

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WHY DIDN’T I SAY

When I was a teenager, I had a terrible time with being different i.e. I was a trans queer child growing up in an inhospitable 1970s working class area, where difference wasn’t accepted or encouraged. It was beaten out of you either at home or at school or on the streets. But magic did happen as it does in a teenager’s life beyond the angst and cacophony of hatred. I managed to find things that were me, beyond this and which my future self would have been proud of.

This song is a fleeting unrequited love story of one summer in that era. I met this girl hanging around the streets where I lived. We had a great time laughing and singing and playing out in an idyllic long hot summer. I was drawn to her beyond ‘normal’ friendship but being queer wasn’t an option as this was the worst thing you could be, you’d literally be better off dead to some families but by the end of the summer her and her family had moved away. Looking back, I think her mum knew she was hanging around with a kid who looked too masculine and different so that was that. I never saw her again.

Musically, I was happy when I got the feel of the song more to a folk/jazz kind of vibe. I think it helped set the scene of the song. I had been practising with different types of finger-picking, instead of just the one I knew and trying to branch out into new territories which helped get this tune going. The strings really help the song, beautifully played and arranged by Simmy Singh.

ME & THIS GHOST

Lives lived in shadows in extreme poverty is something I’ve experienced as a child and as an adult. I’ve lost friends, relatives to addiction. Poverty really does kill people. There’s always a residue when you do make it out like I did. There’s a shadow waiting to maybe reclaim you, a looking over ones shoulder an unease even when things are goin’ well for you. I wrote Me & This Ghost in a time when I was bordering on being taken back and claimed. I was really skint at the time living on very little, barely paying bills, debts mounting and of course didn’t have money to go out and see friends, so I spent a lot of time on my own which was really depressing with nothing except me and my guitar.

The whole gentrification of inner-city London is partly why I headed back to Liverpool for those five years (2017-2022) I was finding it so hard to survive financially and spiritually. The way the city was changing and all the queer venues closing and music venues I loved. I felt like a ghost travelling around a city that was so different before, remembering the times before the gentrification. I had an optimism throughout it though which kind of got me through and plays out in the song.

Musically, I really love the main guitarist Ennio Morricone used on the spaghetti westerns Alexandro Alessandroni who whistles too. I wanted the song to have a Spaghetti Western feel but that little cyclical refrain on a guitar, you can hear it on country songs too – like even Johnny Cash – with the Bo Diddley beat giving it a hefty backbeat.

Lein Sangster: “Being trans is like having who you really are locked in another room which you haven’t got access to.” Photo: Christa Holka

BEAUTIFUL STARS

This song took a good while to form, that matched the cinematic ideas I had in my head. Musically it went through so many drafts until it had the sound I was hearing in my head. Visually it was this: an unnamed war, a soldier, a civilian, a horse, a beach, a starry night, someone lying on a beach injured looking up at the stars, the tide coming in.

The music had to sound expansive, so I knew it had to have strings on it, again Simmy Singh’s string arrangements really add to the song. I wanted it to have a military feel, so the drums have the military solo beat just on snare with the flutter of cymbals in the choruses to lift it.

At the heart of it, the song is about not being ready for a relationship. I studied composing and sound design for film and animation at LCP in London in the early 2000s, as all my life I wanted to have the skill to be able to make music that I could hear in my head. Now I have that skill and can record my own songs in a way I hear them in my head, it makes me really happy.

HISTORY REPEATIN’

I had the tune of History Repeatin’ and my love of soul and 60s RnB. I wanted the song to have a distinct drum beat that was unique to the song. I love Anna (Go To Him) by Arthur Alexander, which would have been some sort of soundtrack to my early years. The song in my head is a soul song.

The song is about someone who behaved like a nightmare. They were in a relationship, got addicted to something, and the relationship failed because of it. Then, they come back a few years later all sorted out and clean, but does this mean that it should start again or does it mean just walk away from it, lesson learned the first time? Can people change?

MINUS ONE

Minus One is about moving on from a toxic relationship and finally having the courage and self-worth to stand up for yourself. The middle eight has the lyrics:

What hour of what day did I lose my way, woke up for the first time mad as hell.
Blinking back the light how to put things right.

That kind of cemented the song musically and lyrically, again my soul influences came out in this. It’s very 60s, maybe not the time signature, but the conclusive middle eight switch in the song to the outro. The vibraphone on the record really adds to the feel, as does my brother Jim’s amazing bassline which is very melodic.

END OF AN ERA

When you’ve lived as long as I have, you realise that your life, and probably most folk’s lives, are a series of eras and when you’re going through these eras you only really appreciate them fully, once they are coming to an end or looking back.

This song was written about my time when I worked weekends in a friend’s tee-shirt shop off Brick Lane in East London. We all used to go to the Golden Heart pub by Spitalfields Market which was an amazing place where Gilbert and George went in the daytime. It attracted lots of artists and musicians, the era was between 2005-2008 before the area was super gentrified. Me and my friends would have crazy debauched nights out there. There was a great jukebox in the pub too, so we’d blast the place out with the tunes we loved.

It’s a goodbye song to London. Also, when I moved back up to Liverpool in 2017 it took on a very emotional feeling, like I was grieving for a time that seemed so uncomplicated, fun, and mysterious. The lyrics took a while to transpire and get right but the tune was easier as I had a clear idea of the type of song it should be nestled in, almost a country-folk song.

Lein Sangster: “I always have more lyrics than tunes.” Photo: Haley Magee

SUMMER RAIN

It was an epic journey to write this song and get it to its final recorded album version. It is about a journey to becoming who you are, the separated self, finally making a connection with who you are and want to be. Being brave and starting over. Being trans is like having who you really are locked in another room which you haven’t got access to. This took years to manifest in me as I had deep rooted transphobia from my childhood from all the name-calling from other kids and what my parents had said to me about what I could and couldn’t be.

The person in the song is a saviour. Someone who sees you for who you are and it’s so liberating and intoxicating. It a love story, a happy ending, a frantic tale to be told running to a point of freedom through the summer rain, it’s a feel-good song.

This song was like chipping away at a structure like a sculpture might do with a piece of rock, its hidden parts revealed itself as I realised what the song was actually saying. There were about 10 drafts lyrically for this song. It’s probably my love of all the psychedelic folk and rock stuff of the late 60s coming out. In Liverpool, the album Forever Changes by Love is a bible. I am deeply influenced by the Velvet Underground too, maybe a bit of Candy Says going on here too.

SHE’S COMIN’ HOME

A prisoner returns to her home, getting out on good behaviour so the friends all gather around and celebrate their release, a big welcome home is planned. This song is celebratory. You don’t know what she had done to serve time, but the song reveals in the lyric, “No one blamed her for what she did you can only take so much.”

I knew a few people who served time in prison back in Liverpool, the song is based on a few characters rolled into one. 

Poverty is inevitably linked with crime. In my head, the character was a queer/femme person, maybe someone who was trans. A lot of my trans friends, including myself, have been attacked. Someone who had fought back when they were attacked, I had a few scenarios going on, but the celebration was definitely like, ‘That’s over now,’ and the person can really live again.

Musically, it’s very 60s. The beat and the bassline compliment the song so well to drive it forward. We rehearsed this song quite a lot before recording it ‘cos it was important to me to have that feel that 60s records would have had with everyone playing in the same room. The trumpet solo adds colour too.

LIBRARY FINES

The character (basically me) accumulates so many bills – final reminders of utility companies and the local library have sent letters. Their life is unmanageable but they decide that, by sitting in bed in a dream world and sitting it out until there’s more hope of a better day, they can deal with it all. Library Fines is a feel-good song ‘cos the character hopes for a better day. It’s about trying to get unstuck.

The song is old school, nowadays you don’t get library fines, but you used to up until about 2015. I did a different version for a single release and got some extra musicians to play on it, which really added to the song. Six-part harmonies, Moog synth, tremolo guitars, Hammond organ and a mellotron all played by a person, not plug-ins but analogue parts recorded.

Lein Sangster: “I have been through hell and back in my life, obviously that’s behind me now. I’ve lived to tell the tale.” Photo: Haley Magee

SAD SONG

Sad Song took a while to get a good feel for it. I had been experimenting with different tunings. One day I had a drop D tuning on my acoustic and played the song, it had a zing to it because of this. I love Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell, also Sonic Youth. These artists mastered the art of making something have its own vibe and not sounding like anything else, due to the different tunings.

I wanted it to be cathartic and help the listener connect to their sadness. Some sad songs by other artists have got me through. I did a poetry writing course for a year at the Poetry School in London. It really helped me with crafting lyrics, not being afraid to keep redrafting the words like you would do with a poem. I wrote this whilst I was doing this course.

The tune was another song that was looking for a home. When I redrafted the lyrics to Sad Song it seemed to fit perfectly. Sometimes, if I’m not happy with a song, I might try different lyrics with the tune. I always have more lyrics than tunes. I find it easier writing lyrics; I’ve always had to work harder at the music.

FUNERAL SONG

This song started out as a poem I had written when my mum died suddenly in 2012. It was a way to try and make sense of her life, cut short by years of alcohol addiction. What made her death even sadder was that she had achieved sobriety a few years leading up to her death. We thought she would live longer.

The day of her funeral was a blazing hot day in July, there was a golden glow to the sky. We were all standing outside the pub and looked up at the sky to see an upside-down rainbow, someone shouted, ‘It’s Mary (my mum) she’s smiling down at us! This was caused by an optical phenomenon called a circumzenithal arc, similar to a halo but its refracted light from ice crystals rather than raindrops, they call it a smile in the sky. There’s a lyric in the song ’you left us a rainbow smiling’ which was this.

After she died, I lost a few friends and more family members. I seemed to be averaging at least two funerals a year. I wanted it to be a song maybe that would help other people with grief and it’s such a specific feeling, sitting in a church with the silence of the people. The day of a funeral is one of the hardest things to go through. The song was hard to write, but it was very cathartic. I’ve only played it live once, but I won’t be playing it live anytime soon as I’m still grieving my dad dying by suicide in 2023.

I have been through hell and back in my life, obviously that’s behind me now. I’ve lived to tell the tale. I’m very grateful for my life nowadays which is the best it’s been with my lovely partner and our lovely dog Scout. I’m a lucky soul. The song is universal, I hope it reaches as many people as possible.

In Spite Of Everything, The Stars is out 6 June on Chemin de Fer Records. Find out Lein’s latest news via her website leinsangster.com

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