Rachel Chinouriri always knew that the bubbling, buoyant indie pop of her 2023 single “Never Need Me” could paper over its sadder sentiment. And so, for her Apple Music Session, the London singer-songwriter felt it was time to offer a pared-back take, with help from Adele pianist Neil Cowley. “I haven’t really had a super-emotional piano version of ‘Never Need Me’, so even when I heard the piano for the first time, I was like, ‘Ah, this is going to add a different essence to what the song means to people,’” she tells Apple Music. “The voice is an instrument to me. So being able to interweave two instruments in that way was great.” Here, Chinouriri also covers Noah Kahan’s “Northern Attitude”, a song she listens to most days. And yet, it wasn’t until she decided to perform it here that she grasped what it was all about. “Even though I sing the lyrics all the time, I realised I sing them incorrectly a lot. Then I was like, ‘Wow, this man is really smart, the way he wrote this,’” she says. “There are elements of that I could put more in my writing. It was just literally eyes closed and going off feeling. I added some of my own harmonies. I think it has an essence of sadness. It was cool to transform it in that way.” For Chinouriri, writing has always been cathartic—and playing live is another kind of musical “therapy”. “I think every time I perform songs live, I’m like, ‘All right, I’m healing,’” she says. “A room of people singing something together—the energy can almost make you tingle. Humans are incredible and the voice is incredible. I think a community of people singing something together is really therapeutic.” Get a taste of that right here.