When Katie Gavin announced she was releasing a solo project, she expected the backlash to be worse. Sitting in the living room of her grandmother's house on a September afternoon, the 31-year-old singer laughs nervously as she looks back at the announcement. “I thought they might be mad at me,” she says of her fans.
As many as one-third of self-described “the largest band in the world” MUNAit stands to reason that Gavin would be nervous. Over the past decade, she and her friends Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin have built the kind of passionate fans most indie acts only dream of. Between sold out shows at iconic venues such as album/1tpRaW0oobL8NV7gZTJ4fS?si=2WV_SlQNQPC8ePduZKqtZQ” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>Greek Theater of Los Angeles and headlining slots at the beloved alt-rock festival All Things Go, MUNA has grown to match the legend its members have created around it — meaning any threat to its existence could be met with vocal backlash.
With the benefit of hindsight, Gavin says that fear is a nice problem to have. “It's good, after all, to have a project where people are invested in what you're going to create next,” he says.
That anger from her fans never materialized—in fact, they overwhelmingly expressed enthusiasm for What a relief, Gavin's debut solo LP is out on Friday (October 25) via Saddest Factory. Described by Gavin as “Lilith Fair-core”, the album is less concerned with the genres of its songs and more with their emotional lyrics – tracks that map the cyclical concept of motherhood (“The Baton”), emotionally authentic romance (” Sanitized” ) and the sadness of losing a pet (“Sweet Abby Girl”) all bear Gavin's stamp of impressively poetic yet lucid songwriting.
As MUNA's lyricist, Gavin found herself in 2019 with a backlog of what she refers to as “MUNA castoffs” — songs she wrote and pitched to her bandmates but ultimately didn't fit the trio's creative vision for themselves. “There's a tonal difference that speaks to the scale of things – MUNA has become so ambitious, so the songs have to scale to a certain size,” he explains. “A lot of these songs feel like they live in a much smaller world.”
But when she shared a selection of those songs with her friends Eric Radloff (known on stage as Okudaxij) and Scott Heiner (MUNA's original drummer), they both told her how much they loved them. “They were the first fans of this solo project,” he says. “I wasn't really thinking about doing anything with them until that started to happen, where I started to realize, 'Oh, it's enough of these songs that became something else.'
Rudloff invited Gavin to play a “secret set” at one of his shows in February 2020, giving her the space to find out “what it would be like to play these songs as me,” she recalls. By the time he was done, he knew he had something special. When COVID-19 shut down the world the following month, Gavin began working with Radloff and Heiner arranging the songs for a possible solo release.
The spirit of sharing the songs she wrote with her friends infuses the final product What a reliefmaking the case for Gavin as one of the most talented songwriters working today. It's a strong case – in addition to writing all of MUNA's songs, Gavin has amassed a string of co-writes with artists such as Maren Morris and The Japanese housewhich she says only contributed to a “shift in my confidence” that allowed her solo LP to exist.
“One of the things that's interesting about writing is that if I'm in a room with someone else, I'm naturally more in tune with what they want. I might lose my own sense of what I want,” she says. “I've had to develop it and try to practice it while also accepting who I am and being honest about it when I'm working so I can navigate and find a way that works for me. It's kind of self-defense.”
Part of that practice means knowing when she's not the best fit for a job — when it came time to fine-tune her album's sound, Gavin says she offered her input, but gave producer Tony Berg and his team of engineers and mixers like Will Maclellan the space they had to make What a relief waft. “I wish it wasn't true, but my instinct was to say I'm a pillow princess in the studio — I don't care what mic we use, I just want to be able to tell you if I like it! she exclaims. “I think part of growing and developing as a creative is understanding the assignment and not trying to control something if it's not your passion.”
While the work spans a wide variety of genres, Gavin acknowledges that much of the record settles somewhere within the folk music spectrum, along the lines of her heroes like Joni Mitchell, the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman. Violins, mandolins and guitars pepper the album's various backdrops as Gavin sings straight to the human condition he wants to change. As she says: “I am will violin.”
One of the album's most beloved singles, “Inconsolable,” even dips into bluegrass, with vocals by Sean and Sara Watkins of the string group Nickel Creek. But Gavin reveals that if it wasn't for friend and label boss Phoebe Bridgers, the song might not have existed in its current form.
“We had done something like Ben Folds, the Regina Spektor-esque piano version of it, and it just didn't hit the same way. We only had a few days in the studio and Phoebe said, “I liked it when it was bluegrass,” she says. Once they had Sean and Sarah in the room, the song finally clicked. “We ended up recording the song in about 10 minutes, I think we did a total of two takes.”
The song isn't a complete change for MUNA fans — on their 2022 affirmation anthem “Kind of Girl,” the pop trio leaned into country ballad stylings to better convey the song's emotional heart. But Gavin explains that there's a strong lyrical difference between a song like “Kind of Girl” and one like “Inconsolable.” “It sounds weird — I think there's this difference between the song 'work in the garden' (on 'Kind of Girl') and the song 'baby lizards' (on 'Inconsolable'),” he quips.
Early in the process of making her album, Gavin approached McPherson and Maskin, telling them she wanted to release the LP as a solo project. Despite some jokes shared an episode of their podcast Gayotic (“What was the reason you wanted to do this without Naomi and me?” asked Maskin pointedly), and both of Gavin's bandmates supported the idea, with Maskin even playing a number of backing instruments on the final version of the album.
“I'm so grateful that they've been super, super supportive,” says Gavin. “The only thing they were concerned about is my workaholism, because that just means I took on a second job — they'd both check in, like, 'Cool, how are you?'”
The work ethic of the individual band members, however, is what helped MUNA become a cult favorite in the pop arena. With the trio's oft-cited status as pop music's top 'queer heroes', Gavin has seen a huge rise in queer artists in the last year, with pop stars like Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp and others breaking into mainstream audiences . way that once seemed impossible.
“It makes me really emotional, seeing these young people come out as real superheroes,” says Gavin. The singer is hesitant to give too much credence to the current state of queerness in pop music (“There's a loud voice in my head that says, 'This would have happened regardless, b—h,'” she laughs). But she finally admits she's watching, in real time, as she and her two best friends at least help make lasting changes.
“If you keep your head down and work and think what you're doing with your friends is cool, you can eventually, in ten years, change the culture of the king,” he says. “It's wild how far your impact can go if you're constantly trying to ground [yourself] in the world you want to be in.”
However, there are aspects of the current rise of LGBTQ+ artists that Gavin is wary of – especially when it comes to how non-straight and non-cisgender identities are already seen as trends for the music industry to capitalize on.
“That's how the current stage of capitalism we're at works,” he says with a sigh. “Every time the structure realizes it can benefit from a new identity, people of that identity are presented with a choice – do I want to assimilate and assume these privileges?”
Gavin validates the choice of many artists to accept these benefits – after all, “they are all in such desperate financial situations that it makes sense”. But she makes it clear, when it comes to both MUNA and her solo career, that she's more interested in building a sustainable future for herself and artists like her.
“There are so many people I consider brothers in my community who are not safe right now and I want to be with them. I don't want to be with straight people,” he says. “So we will continue to push the envelope and make it clear that we are not happy to be 'part of the club'.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/culture/pride/katie-gavin-solo-what-a-relief-muna-interview-1235807908/
