{"id":7801,"date":"2025-11-27T13:42:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T13:42:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unlockingsite.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/27\/kito-on-the-magic-of-making-lily-allens-west-end-girl\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T13:42:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T13:42:15","slug":"kito-on-the-magic-of-making-lily-allens-west-end-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.unlockingsite.com\/index.php\/2025\/11\/27\/kito-on-the-magic-of-making-lily-allens-west-end-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Kito on the Magic of Making Lily Allen’s ‘West End Girl’"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Has grim detail ever dazzled so brightly? <\/p>\n

Online discourse is in a feverish state of distraction, but Lily Allen\u2019s surprise comeback masterpiece West End Girl<\/em> captured the zeitgeist\u2019s attention. Rather than veiling the unwinding of her marriage with Stranger Things <\/em>star David Harbour in metaphors and innuendo, Allen and her co-writers wrote a granular, chronological accounting of Allen’s heartbreaking story \u2014 detailing Allen’s negotiations over monogamy, encountering the \u201cother woman\u201d in \u201cMadeline<\/a>\u201d, and Allen\u2019s own struggles with sobriety throughout the whole heartbreak.<\/p>\n

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For listeners, jetting into Allen\u2019s marital turmoil was harrowing enough. One could only imagine the intensity of Allen\u2019s co-collaborators who helped the British star craft the record in a roughly 16 day sprint of writing and recording. One of those collaborators is Kito<\/u><\/a>, who co\u2013executive produced the entire record and was a co-writer\/co-producer on 8 of the album\u2019s 14 tracks.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe first day … [Lily] just caught us up on everything and she’d written down song titles the night before,\u201d Kito tells PAPER<\/em>. \u201cI don’t think we really thought that we’d pull off an album that quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kito describes the experience of hearing Allen\u2019s story as \u201cheavy,\u201d but offers there was a helpful balance of energy in the room, between an urgency to finish record in the short time that Allen was in Los Angeles, alongside a sensitivity to her very recent experience. \u201cThere was that race to the finish line; it sort of felt like, if we don’t just finish it, it might not come out<\/em>,\u201d recalls Kito.<\/p>\n

There is an undoubtable strangeness, Kito shares, in the fact that the whole world is now \u201csinging along\u201d to Allen\u2019s difficult story. She remembers recently when Allen and her collaborators had a \u201cPussy Palace\u201d party on Halloween (\u201cPussy Palace\u201d is the name of a song and what Allen calls her ex\u2019s Manhattan pad.) \u201cWe were all dancing to ‘Pussy Palace’ in my living room and I said to Lily, \u2018Is it a bit weird that we’re all celebrating and dancing to\u2026\u2019 And she’s like, \u2018My trauma?\u2019\u201d Kito shares.<\/p>\n

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