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NICHOLAS CANYON -- With a gentle catch in her voice, Kate Hudson sings a tumbling paean to growing up alongside one’s first child; offering a mix of awe, support, and wisdom, “Live Forever” is a celebration of the path you can’t imagine, the love that transcends all others and the glow of watching your son mature into a young man who’s independent yet always Mama’s baby. While Hudson co-wrote the song with Danny Fujikawa, Linda Perry and Johan Carlsson, the official music video for the song was produced by Fujikawa and Hudson.
“Depending on how you listen,” Hudson begins, “it could be a song of first love, young love, because it has the element of being barely an adult. If that’s how it is for you, I love that. But for me, it’s about the absolutely consuming joy Ryder was for me from the moment he arrived. Nothing can prepare you for a love that swallows you whole, but that’s what watching my son grow up has been for me – and when we started writing these songs, it was a feeling that absolutely had to be part of the record.”
For the girl who came of age in the California canyons as Pearl Jam, Tom Petty and John Prine all leaving their very singular mark on a generation of young people, as well as Madonna and Joni Mitchell, Hudson absorbed all of the music, the emotions, and memories of those days. Over the years since, music has carried her forward, whether playing her piano at home, writing songs in the margins of books or singing for her own enjoyment.
That love demanded its proper place in her life all these years later. After being challenged by Linda Perry to create a collection of songs that cohered as an album, to share her own music with the world, the Oscar-nominated actor cored into her own life to emerge with a dozen songs that spoke to the heart and the human condition.
Like the whirling pop of first single, “Talk About Love,” as silky as it is propulsive, “Live Forever” delivers a bright, bucolic folk pledge to her son. Leading with a video filled with home movies that run the gauntlet from golf carts, cradles and Disneyland to full-grown young man, Hudson delivers a clip that more than matches her song’s intention.
“You don’t want to give away your child’s privacy,” she explains. “But you want to show people how glorious loving a child can be. I was so young when Ryder was born, I look back and marvel; I was almost a kid, too, so we were able to fall in love with growing up at the same time. And when you listen to the song and watch, it sweeps you up like someone’s arms around you.”
With her voice as much velvet as sunshine, it suits the gentle way the story of raising her son rolls out, especially her hop-skip-jump delivery on the chorus. Independently recorded, Hudson, Perry, Fujikawa and Carlsson have created a sound that “Live Forever” exults in the sweetness of a celestial melody, tick-tock beat and her own guileless vocals.
With an album due late spring, Kate Hudson – songwriter, singer, doyenne, diva – continues emerging as a woman who understands life is a song, the quest for love and the need for human bonding. With “Live Forever,” she makes it personal and universal all at once.
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