Katie Gavin: “The coolest thing would be if this became some young people’s record they associate with growing up”

Katie Gavin is performing at “the only surviving Elizabethan church in London” when she’s struck by a realisation. “I can’t remember the last time I prayed,” she sings three lines into ‘Today’, the gorgeous lilting indie-folk cut she opens her show at Stoke Newington’s The Old Church with. As the line lingers in the space between its vivid stained glass windows, she looks around and takes in the setting she’s just delivered it in and lets out an infectious cackle that’s soon echoed by the fans watching on from the church floor.

The irony of singing the lyric – and some others from her stellar solo debut record ‘What A Relief’ – in such a venue isn’t lost on the MUNA star. “That was so funny,” she laughs a few days later when NME catches up with her. “I do write and think about God a decent amount. I do consider myself to be a spiritual person, but I didn’t think about opening with that song and what that was going to feel like in that space. But it was kind of perfect to have a moment of laughing with people.”

We meet Gavin at an outside table of a trendy East London cafe, ready to talk about her upcoming LP over oat flat whites and banana bread. The golden sunlight has made a rare appearance in between London’s grey autumn weather, temperate enough that Katie’s chic leather jacket is enough to keep out the cold. She is a generous interviewee, thoughtful and game to follow our conversation from tangent to tangent, discussing everything from Catholic guilt to our cats, as well as, of course, the process of creating her upcoming album.

‘What A Relief’ is Gavin’s first solo release after over a decade of making music with MUNA, the indie-pop band she’s better known as a member of. It’s excellent – her almighty songwriting pen shining throughout as she spins brilliantly honest stories and reflections that tackle life’s grey areas over folk and country-infused sonics (or, as Gavin has described the music, “Lilith Fair-core”). It draws on the music she listened to growing up – artists like Sarah McLachlan, Tracy Chapman, Tori Amos and Fiona Apple; “people who were writing things that really spoke to their interior life”.

“I hit a different stride in terms of self-esteem and how I see myself as a musician and a songwriter”

“I grew up listening to that kind of music; it was almost more when I wanted to start MUNA that that was this different world I was interested in exploring – pop music and songs you could dance to,” she muses today. “But country and singer-songwriter [music] was something I grew up with, and it was always the style I would write when I was younger.”

Gavin’s brief step aside from her role in MUNA is both entirely amicable – bandmates Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson fully support the project and contributed instrumentals to several tracks on the record – and slightly alien to her. “I don’t know when this is going to start feeling normal,” she shares candidly on that church stage at her London show.

As well as being her first solo record, ‘What A Relief’ is also very different musically in places, with Gavin playing instruments like the fiddle – an instrument she first picked up as a teen and revisited after her mother found her student violin in storage last year – and Shruti box onstage. “I am so used to performing in a certain type of way where I’m pretty much just dancing and singing,” she tells NME.

“Playing instruments has been a big shift – and being responsible for so much of the arrangement of a song – but it’s ‘not normal’ in a good way. I like that I am having to return to those roots of ‘I’ve gotta play the music’. That’s what I’ve been nervous about, I think, on this run as, obviously, my bandmates in MUNA are such talented musicians. And Nana [Adjoa], the person I’m playing with on the solo tour, is such a talented instrumentalist. So, it’s pretty much like, ‘Am I going to be able to play these parts’?” She needn’t worry. The answer is, of course, yes.

‘What A Relief’ was written over the course of seven years, the process starting with pop-laced earworm ‘Casual Drug Use’, which Gavin says the earliest demos of “very clearly tell that it was written to be a MUNA song”. With a catalogue of songs slowly being built over the years, it wasn’t until 2020 that the idea of creating a solo record first started to take real shape.

As she built up a collection of songs, she turned to mates Eric Radloff [a friend and collaborator Gavin knows from college, who also makes music under the Okudaxij moniker] and MUNA’s original drummer Scott Heiner for advice. Knowing the band wasn’t busy at the time, the pair told Gavin: “Look, we’re not doing anything else. How about we just arrange some of these for fun?” The results were 10 songs finished over a fortnight, these tracks forming a key paving stone in the winding road to what would eventually become the album.

This path also included working with The Japanese House’s Amber Bain on several songs and two stints in the studio with Tony Berg, the latter of whom was introduced to Gavin by her Saddest Factory label boss, Phoebe Bridgers. An initial set of sessions with Berg left Gavin unsatisfied, but when she went back into the studio with him in February and March of this year, things finally fell into place.

“The stuff that happened in between both the meetings [with Berg] was very relevant because MUNA had put out our third album, and we’d toured a lot,” she reflects. “I think maybe I hit a different stride in terms of self-esteem and how I see myself as a musician and songwriter, and just having the ability to be honest about what I need.”

“I’m a moral scrupulosity girlie, and I’m very aware of the fact that I’m never behaving perfectly”

Bridgers, who also signed MUNA to Saddest Factory, played a vital role as an A&R across ‘What A Relief’. “When we were going back in with Tony, there were 15 or 20 songs we were choosing between,” Gavin recalls. “Phoebe, Tony and I all came in with a list of what we thought the record should be, and then we used those lists to determine [the tracklisting]. So, she helped me pick out what the songs were actually going to be.”

“If I had been a teenager when this album came out, I would have followed Katie like the Grateful Dead,” Bridgers tells NME via email. “I could really have used it. It is earnest and empathetic to the human experience in a way I learned to squash out of myself very young and am only now reprogramming.”

Ask Gavin about her aspirations for the record, and you’ll find her unwittingly echoing Bridgers’ comments. “I just hope that the songs mean something to people,” she says. “The coolest thing in the world would be – because I have albums that meant a lot to me when I was 14 – if this became some young people’s record that really was their record that they associated with growing up, that they put it on and it meant a lot to them.”

It was also Bridgers who first suggested that the heart-wrenching ‘As Good As It Gets’ should be a duet and that Gavin’s musical partner-in-crime for the track should be one of her favourite songwriters – Mitski. What was it like reaching out to her hero to ask her to collaborate? “She’s very easy to talk to!” Gavin smiles. “She’s a sweetie, and she’s always been very supportive. I just figured, ‘Why not give it a go?’ There was this little feeling of ‘This would be so insane if it happened, so there was this feeling of, ‘Whatever, might as well ask’. She hit me back really quickly and said she’d do it and just made it really easy.”

The end results, she says, are buoyed massively by Mitski’s contributions: “Every choice that she makes feels so imbued with heart, the way that she lilts the pitches at the end of one of the last times she sings, ‘I think this is as good as it gets’ – she just does something crazy with her voice where it feels like it’s in the grey area. She makes such intelligent choices.”

Grey areas are a key thread throughout the record, both in the music and within the lyrics. Throughout, Gavin looks at someone’s responsibility and accountability in situations as opposed to focusing on an action being done to them. “I think about that all the time,” she says. “I also think part of it is my neurodivergence, as I’m a moral scrupulosity girlie [and] I’m very aware of the fact that I’m never behaving perfectly, and I’m often causing harm, even if I’m not intending to. I’m just not interested in a culture of ‘Fuck this person forever’.”

You can hear “the most intense version of that” in ‘Keep Walking’ when Gavin sings: “I saw your mum in my dream/She called me an asshole, and I felt released.” “[That song] is like, ‘I don’t think we can interact as it’s not good when we do, and I wish that wasn’t the case, but sometimes you just have to accept that reality’,” she explains.

There are more lighthearted moments elsewhere on the record. Take ‘Aftertaste’, which was written on the same day as MUNA’s certified banger ‘Silk Chiffon’. It was, Gavin explains, just a “normal day”, going to see a pal in concert and “feeling like a fun, flirty girl about town”. ‘Aftertaste’ was more connected to the actual experience of that night: “I saw someone that I’d had a crush on at the show and was like, ‘Oh, a big reason that I came here was to see that person’.” We’ve all been there.

Next month, Gavin will be back on stage herself, playing the kind of venues she’s a little more used to than old churches. The run of dates, though, will still be very different to the tour she recently embarked on with MUNA, supporting Taylor Swift on ‘The Eras’ tour. “It was really fun; that stage is so gargantuan that it feels like you’re a kid on a playground. I was just running around the whole time,” Gavin says. “[Swift] runs a very happy ship – everyone that works for her feels very considered and cared for, which I think is very impressive as there are so many people. But I think it makes the show as special as it is. I really respect the way she does business.”

For now, though, Gavin is preparing for her own special moment – sharing ‘What A Relief’ with the world. As our time begins to wrap up, we pose a weighty question to her: what did she learn about herself through making this album? “It was a really emboldening process,” Gavin replies. “I think the biggest thing I learned is I can make a record on my own.” And one that sounds pretty damn good at that.

Katie Gavin’s ‘What A Relief’ is out on October 25 via Saddest Factory Records

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