Songwriter Paul Kahn has released Willingness, a six-track country EP recorded with Grammy® winner Catherine Russell, his duet partner of twenty-five years. The record blends country with touches of reggae and blues, threading male and female vocals through acoustic arrangements drenched in rural warmth.

Twenty-five years is a long time to sing with someone. Long enough to forget how you sounded apart. Long enough for two voices to develop a shared muscle memory — the way old tennis partners stop signaling who takes the ball and just move. Paul Kahn and Catherine Russell have been at it since the late nineties, picking up awards along the way (a Grammy® for her, among others), and by now their vocal interplay has reached the stage where effort becomes invisible. You hear the result on Willingness, their new six-track EP: country music that sounds lived-in, unhurried, warm the way a kitchen is warm when bread has been baking all morning.

Here’s the thing about Willingness, though — it has an argument to make, and the argument is atmospheric. Paul Kahn wrote these songs to evoke a specific kind of day. A day outdoors, among familiar people, under a sky that stays clear from the first track to the last. The EP moves through that day chronologically — morning light, drowsy afternoon, a drive with the windows down, a backyard party, a quiet sunset — and the sequencing matters. Pull any single track out of context and it’s a pleasant country song. Leave all six in order and something else clicks: a sense of place, a sense of temperature, a day you recognize even if you’ve only lived it in your head.

Catherine Russell‘s presence reshapes what could have been a solo songwriter record into something with genuine conversational texture. Her voice — darkened and deepened by decades of jazz and blues — meets Paul Kahn‘s gentler, more plainspoken delivery at an angle that produces real friction-free warmth. They hand lines to each other the way people pass dishes across a table: casually, instinctively, already knowing who reaches for what.

“Stain On My Sleeve” sets the clock to early morning. Catherine comes in on backing vocals over light percussion, bell-like chimes, and guitars that float in the space between folk and Nashville polish. Paul Kahn sings softly here, almost privately — the song feels addressed to one specific person standing right there in the room. A strong opener, the kind that tells you exactly what altitude this record will cruise at.

“Memory Lane” tilts the whole EP toward reggae, and the tilt is surprisingly natural. Both voices enter together from the jump, swaying through a contemplative groove that favors patience over pulse. The interesting move is how the Jamaican inflection arrives — through vocal phrasing, through the way words get stretched and placed, while the acoustic bed underneath stays firmly country. The track slows time down, deliberately, almost stubbornly.

The title song goes even quieter. “Willingness” is a country ballad built for two people talking after everyone else has gone home — hushed voices, shared pauses, a guitar solo near the end that arrives slow and golden and turns the track into the emotional center of gravity for the entire EP. This is where Paul Kahn‘s songwriting ambition reveals itself most clearly: the song asks you to sit still, and rewards you for it.

“Pull Another Leaf From The Clover” breaks the spell on purpose. Paul Kahn takes lead, Catherine holds back until the chorus, and the energy jumps — playful guitar runs, a bouncy tempo, the feel of a car on an empty road with green scrolling past the windows. After the deep stillness of the title track, the contrast hits right.

“Carrie Ann” pushes the reggae dial furthest. Sunny and loose, it radiates backyard-party warmth — the kind of track where everyone already knows each other and the drinks keep coming. Paul Kahn‘s voice wraps around the guitar with lazy affection, and the song becomes the most effortlessly joyful thing on the record.

“No One To Cry To” closes the set where country meets light blues. Female backing vocals step forward, layering the finale in close harmony. Confetti still glints in the grass, the sun sits low, conversations trail off. A good ending — the EP folds itself up gently, the way a picnic blanket gets folded at dusk.

So here’s the honest question: does Willingness play it safe? Yes. Deliberately and proudly safe. The reggae stays ornamental. The blues stays polite. The dynamic range stays narrow from start to finish. A more adventurous record might have let “Memory Lane” unspool into a slow-burning seven-minute dub meditation, or pushed “No One To Cry To” toward something more raw and ragged at the edges. Paul Kahn went the other direction — toward precision and craft, toward the kind of meticulous warmth that leaves zero rough edges.

And yet — two listens in, maybe three, the argument starts winning you over. The sameness turns out to be structural. Each track feeds the next, building a cumulative mood that individual songs, shuffled out of order, would lose entirely. Paul Kahn and Catherine Russell sequenced this record the way you plan a good day: morning energy, midday stillness, afternoon drive, evening celebration, quiet wind-down. That arc gives six modest songs a purpose bigger than any one of them carries alone.

Willingness is a record that asks very little of you — your time, your willingness to slow down — and repays it with an afternoon you’ll want to revisit. Country right now is obsessed with scale. Paul Kahn made something small and meant every second of it. That counts for plenty.

‘Willingness’ will be released on 19/06/2026 on all platforms.

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