How To Be Human

How to Be Human documents one turbulent year in Cat Burns’ life, when she lost her grandad and experienced the end of a long-term relationship. “This is an album about grief, loss and heartbreak—and it’s a sad club to be a part of,” the Londoner tells Apple Music. “I had a lot of messages from people who’d lost someone through passing away and gone through a breakup. You have two massive life changes happen in one go, which makes you feel like the world is crashing down on top of you.” The songs on the follow-up to 2024’s early twenties run chronologically from one April to the next and they’re immensely moving and comforting to anyone who’s experienced loss. “Sad Forever” sees Burns breaking down in the midst of grief and confiding in her mum, while the celebratory “GIRLS!” shows light at the end of the tunnel. “It was very cathartic. For me, this is my comfort album,” says Burns. “They’re song diaries of me navigating my way through grief and heartbreak. Eventually, everybody has to experience their first heartbreak and the loss of someone. So I knew it was going to be a defining moment, but I didn’t know how defining. At the time, I didn’t know if I was going to get through it.” Burns takes the listener on a journey in 16 tracks. “I love musical theatre, and the way the album tells a story feels like a musical to me, from not wanting to accept things in the first half and then the beauty of letting go in the second,” she says. By the end, Burns is in a good place and the album’s release coincides with a time when her star has risen thanks to a pivotal role in BBC One’s The Celebrity Traitors. “I like to keep people guessing and do random things sometimes because that’s what life’s about,” she says. Read on as she takes you through 10 of the album’s key tracks. “Come Home” “Lots of my favourite artists have a song dedicated to a family member who’s no longer with them. Ed Sheeran’s got ‘Supermarket Flowers’ and Tori Kelly has a song called ‘Your Words’. I knew once my grandad passed away, I wanted to make a song that reflected how he viewed life and death. He was a very religious man and viewed passing away as the universe and God calling you back home once you’ve done everything you need to do on this Earth. So I wanted to pay homage to him, with the first verse showing how his passing was for us, but in the second verse I’m telling the story of him coming over from Jamaica. I wanted the start of the album to throw everybody in at the deep end.” “Can Time Move Faster?” “I talk to myself a lot, so I made videos of me at different points in my grief journey to see where I was at. This has a voice memo of me crying. We always hear from people when they’re out of the storm, and they say, ‘Don’t worry, you can get through it and everything’s going to be fine.’ But I wanted to document the process. People need to know they’re not alone in feeling what they’re feeling. I always say the day after the funeral is the hardest because that’s when people think you don’t need them anymore. You’re supposed to go back to normal, but I wanted to show how hard it is. This is when I wanted to skip to the point where time would heal me because I felt so heavy all the time.” “I Hope It’s Me” “‘I Hope It’s Me’ favours my hopeless romantic side. I have a massive heart and I love people intensely. This was written fresh after a relationship ending. I wasn’t processing it yet, but seeing reminders of that person everywhere I went. I think a lot of people hope they can reconcile with their first love and this song feeds into that. Even when I hear this song now, it’s uncomfortable to listen to because I’m in such a different place. But it had to be on the album because that’s how I felt in the moment. So many people are at that stage of their breakup where they’re like, ‘That’s my person and I don’t care what happens, we’re going to find our way back to each other.’” “Sad Forever” “This was written a few weeks after my grandad passed away and everything was in turmoil. I was crying every day and in a hard place. I went into my mum’s room and she hugged me and was there for me and calmed me down. She told me about her first heartbreak. I wanted to explore that in a song: I was going through this hard time and the only person I could look to for comfort was my mum because she knew just what to say. The chorus is like affirmations you can say to yourself. You’re not going to be sad forever, but you have to feel it now and trust it will get better. These feelings will pass.” “All This Love” “I realised that crying all the time and having all these emotions are not negative things. This is what love is. I have love for these two people and I can’t give it to them anymore. How do I navigate this? As soon as I started to accept that grief was love with no place to go, I found it way easier to handle. I talk about starting to go out more and trying to enjoy my life. Sometimes, you can think you’re not allowed to feel happy when you’ve lost somebody. Over time, I tried to find new places to put this love—and that’s more into my friends, more into myself and more into my dog. She’s a cavapoo and she’s the light of my life.” “GIRLS!” “With ‘GIRLS!’, it was towards the end of the summer and I was starting to feel a bit more confident in myself. I realised I’d written love songs in the past, but I’d never made a fun, flirty pop track about my love of women across the board. And I was feeling more confident in myself and noticing an attraction from women towards me, especially because this was my first time being single after a long-term relationship. So I was experiencing being single in my mid-twenties and thinking, ‘Wow, this is fun.’” “There’s Just Something About Her” “This is a lovely pop song about that first stage of really liking somebody. A lot of my queer friends feel it. They’ll message me and they go, ‘Oh, I’ve just met somebody and it’s a whirlwind. I can’t work out why I’m so obsessed with them.’ I wanted to make a song about that, when you meet someone and you love everything about them. It’s like this person’s laced with something! I’ve always wanted to make songs about specific scenarios that are relatable to everybody, and I’m a detail-oriented person, so I love writing songs about those moments we all experience.” “Please Don’t Hate Me” “‘Please Don’t Hate Me’ is about the guilt you can feel for moving on. When you come out of a relationship, especially if it was long-term, you feel a level of loyalty towards that person. Sometimes, you can feel like, if you move on, you’re cheating on them, because you’ve been with them for so long. Allowing yourself to be loved by somebody else and to love somebody else can make you feel guilty. With people’s first loves, you think you’re going to be with that person forever and that’s why your heart breaks. I’m saying, ‘I don’t regret our relationship’ because I’m writing from an ending where no one did anything wrong and it was just life.” “I Wish You Well” “This is one of my favourites. It’s a conscious decision for me to always make higher vibrational songs with an element of hope. I believe that songs are spells—and if you put negative energy out into the world, that’s what will come back to you. I’m lucky enough that I haven’t experienced hard things in relationships, so I choose not to have a victim mindset. I’m not going to act like we weren’t together and we didn’t have a lovely relationship and we didn’t try, because we did. Even though we’re not speaking, I’m always sending good vibrations your way because I always want the best for you.” “How to Be Human” “If you’ve got ADHD or autism, or both, like me, I’ve always felt like there’s hidden cameras everywhere and someone’s about to go, ‘Stop. You’ve said that wrong,’ or ‘You’re doing life wrong.’ And I wanted to explore that idea in a non-cringey way. I remember going into the session thinking I want to make a song about being neurodivergent and what that means to me. So that’s why the first verse is saying I learned how to speak, socialise and exist from the media and TV shows, and I’m a sponge. I wanted that song to wrap up the whole album and end it there because this is a very neurodivergent way of processing grief. It ends with the vocoder to play on the idea of people seeing neurodivergent people as a bit robotic, not showing that much emotion, when there’s so much going on under the surface.”