Cover Feature Katie Gavin: What Katie Did Next

“It was chill,” confirms Gavin. “The truth is, they’re sweethearts and the conversation happened over a long period of time. When you’re on the outside, it seemed to happen very quickly but that wasn’t the case for us. Also… they just didn’t want to work on these songs!” she shrugs. “I would compare it to any long-term relationship. Ideally you’re growing together, but it’s not realistic to think that every direction that you’re growing in, they’ll want to do that with you. Sometimes you have to go on a little journey on your own, but it’s for the health and benefit of that relationship.” 

The seeds of Gavin’s solo record began to sprout back in lockdown. Texting song ideas back and forth with her good friends, Okudaxij’s Eric Radloff and MUNA’s original drummer Scott Heiner, they decided to work on arranging ten of her tracks in a studio in Silver Lake. “It was full pandemic time, everyone was wearing masks. One of my dogs went into heart failure while making the record!” she recalls – a tragedy later to be captured on album track, ‘Sweet Abby Girl’. “It was a lot, but it was this very romantic, special, fun vibe. I did it with my homies; Jo[sette Maskin, MUNA guitarist] played on a lot of songs, as did Geo [Bolteho, MUNA bassist]. Naomi [MUNA’s other guitarist] played some keys and was helping us as an engineer. I was ready to put that out as a record.” 

Around the same time, MUNA signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ label Saddest Factory, and Gavin sent the songs to her new label boss. To her surprise, she loved them. “The original plan was to put the songs out on my Bandcamp or something, but Saddest Factory has first right of refusal. Then I was like, ‘Oh that’s cool that Phoebe wants to put them out’, but she asked if I would be down for polishing them a little bit with her producer, Tony Berg.” 

Despite Berg’s credentials as an LA producing legend, something in those sessions didn’t quite gel. Perhaps it was Gavin’s attachment to the original demos and the vibe of the pandemic sessions but the project was put on hold as she headed out on the road for what would be MUNA’s biggest tour to date. It was only after a triumphant final homecoming show at LA’s Greek Theater that her head returned to the unreleased songs and, after some sage advice from a friend, she decided to head back to the studio with Berg, letting him “do what he does best” and starting the process over again, reworking the material from scratch. 

The result is twelve tracks that make up her solo debut, ‘What a Relief’. Referring to it as ‘Lilith Fair-core’ after the female-focused travelling music festival, founded by Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLaughlan, throughout the record Gavin’s lyricism is given space to shine across a blend of folk, alternative and country-tinged tracks with a distinctly ‘90s flavour (think: Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple, Tori Amos). Whereas ‘Aftertaste’ is something of a MUNA-coded gateway to ease fans into this new world (“It was the only track Naomi and Jo did eventually want to work on but I said, ‘I need a single. I’m keeping it!’”), the rest of the album leans more heavily in this new direction. There’s vulnerability in the pared-back, finger picking nature of the tracks – more than half of which forgo any kind of drums for occasional strings and acoustic guitar. 

Too young to remember Lilith Fair the first time around, Gavin’s love for its lineup developed in her twenties. “I was 24, living in Glendale, without a car, watching full Tori Amos sets on YouTube like, this is the coolest woman who ever lived!” she remembers. “I really romanticised that time. I got to meet Sarah McLaughlan recently because she’s making a record with Tony [Berg] right now – it’s been so kismet, in the last couple of months I’ve met Katheen Hana, Sarah and Ani DiFranco… But I got to talk to Sarah a little about Lilith and she was like, ‘Yeah, don’t romanticise that time. It was really hard!’”

 Lyrically, across the record Gavin explores love – both new and old – and mother-daughter relationships, most notably on ‘The Baton’ which lands at the realisation that your parents are only human and can only take you so far in life. Later, on ‘Inconsolable’ she nods at a childhood without “cuddles”. Is becoming a mother – or her own relationship with her mother – something that occupies her thoughts? “I think about it a lot. I think about it all the time,” she laughs knowingly, in what DIY’s BRAT-addled brain assumes must be a Charli xcx reference. “Being 31, you naturally start having more conversations about having kids and freezing eggs. I’m queer, so you have to be more intentional. But honestly, as a queer artist in the music scene, it’s 40, if at all.” 

On writing ‘The Baton’, she admits to “carrying that metaphor” in her back pocket for a long time. “I was talking to Lucy [Dacus] about the record, I said there was this song called ‘The Baton’ and she said, ‘Oh, is it about intergenerational trauma as a relay race?’ I was like, yeah – she gets it.” 

The track led to an emotional moment with her own mother. When playing it for the first time, they sat together and cried. “Then she said she wanted to make a music video for it,” Gavin laughs. “I have a mom who will text me random music video ideas – she has all these photos from my childhood. She wants to make a collage on iMovie or something.” 

The fandom would want to assume that MUNA and Boygenius are best friends who hang out all the time. However, with Bridgers as label boss and Dacus sequencing the album, it seems like maybe that fantasy is more than just a sapphic dream. “Yeah, we do hang out. I love them. I don’t see Phoebe so much because she lives a little further away but Lucy’s my little sweetheart,” Gavin smiles. “We connected really quickly and easily. I think it’s important to have friends in this line of work who can validate certain things that are hard about it. You need a safe space to complain because I also understand we are the luckiest people. But yeah, I haven’t seen them recently because I’m in workaholic mode but I did text Lucy the other day, like ‘I miss you’ and she said ‘Well let’s fucking hang out’.”

Elsewhere on the album, ‘As Good As It Gets’ tells the story of the type of love you get when you stop chasing epic highs and hellish lows. It’s an incredibly real portrayal of a relationship that, to some, may seem depressing but, to others, is the very definition of true happiness. “It was Phoebe’s idea to have ‘As Good As It Gets’ be a duet,” notes Gavin. “So I texted it to Mitski, which was a huge swing, and she responded five minutes later and said, ‘I love this song, it’s beautiful’. She kind of bent over backwards to make it work because she was on tour at the time, and recorded it when she was home for a couple of days in the middle. I just really love her and she’s been really supportive and has been a homie. I think it will really help me.” 

The pair met in 2020 when Gavin went to Nashville to spend the day writing. As a long-time fan, Gavin thinks, with hindsight, she was perhaps a bit intense. “I fully cried in the session,” she admits. “With Mitski now, I do feel like we’re kinda friends and I can talk to her normally. But she’s also my favourite songwriter of a generation – probably my favourite living songwriter. And so I think I can put energy on her that sucks to have put on you. I sort of consulted her as if she was an oracle,” she cringes. 

On the day, she hit Mitski with the big questions – a casual “I don’t really know who I am or what I’m doing” – but her response may have led to the birth of ‘What A Relief’. “She said, ‘It seems like you have these songs – maybe you should just put them out?’ Gavin recalls. “I doubt she’ll even remember the conversation, but because it was Mitski, I took that totally to heart. Like, I guess I’m making a solo record then!” 

In the wider pop landscape, 2024 has been a huge year for queer female artists seeing major chart success. “I feel really proud,” says Gavin, when asked about the rise. “I don’t want to have a crazy ego about it, but I do feel like MUNA definitely played a role in it. It makes me emotional to think that girls like Chappell [Roan] or Reneé [Rapp] saw MUNA and were like, ‘OK, there’s space for me in this world’.” 

It was a shift Gavin discussed with Rapp when presenting her with an award at a recent New York Pride event. “We had a cute conversation. It’s such a trip how much things have changed and so quickly,” she smiles. “When we started in 2014, having an actual lesbian pop star… it wasn’t quite unimaginable because we were imagining it like, ‘Us…?’ But it was a distant dream, and so it’s amazing having those girls have this moment.” 

For Roan in particular, despite slogging as a musician for a long time in cult circles, her stratospheric rise to the top of the charts has felt like it’s happened in a heartbeat. She’s been vocal about the toll that’s taken on her mental health. “Chappell knows how much I love her and we’ve been trying to hang out, but I honestly think she’s just on another planet right now,” says Gavin. “I can’t really fathom what she’s going through and I know that it must be a lot. I hope that we get some time and I also hope that she already has a community of friends. That’s one thing about doing this – even having a tiny taste of being a solo artist – it’s a lot more fun to do it as a band. So my heart goes out to all the solo artists. Chappell knows I’m here whenever she needs anything.” 

When we talk, Joe Biden has not long stepped out of the race to become the next President of the United States of America, paving the way for Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party candidate, who’ll go up against Donald Trump in November’s election. 

“Honestly, I don’t know how I’m feeling about the country,” Gavin sighs when asked if she’s feeling optimistic. “I will tell you that after this interview I’m getting on a call for what is, I guess, my fourth job – organising with a group called Resource Generation, getting involved in a housing justice campaign in LA. I feel excited about some of the city council members that are running this year – Ysabel Jurado and Jillian Burgos. One of my ways to pay it forward is to just focus on staying politically active and having a political home in my city; people that I organise with and have real relationships with. It’s been really good for me. We’re in a time where it really does feel like the world is ending. There’s an active genocide which neither one of our candidates is supporting a ceasefire around.” 

Clearly considering her responsibility to her fans, she reverts back: “I’ll just say, I’m going to vote for Kamala. But I’m really focusing my energy on more local politics and politics in a sustained way. The thing that annoys me is that there’s some shaming on the left like, ‘How dare you not show up and yell off the rooftops for Kamala when Trump is so much worse – you should be getting involved.’ My perspective is that we need people working for change from all different directions. We need the people who are super super far left, but we also need the people who are making compromises. But I feel like y’all are shaming us for not showing up a certain way when actually we are organising all the time. Maybe we would not be choosing the lesser of two evils if people were consistently organising. We can accomplish a lot more in four years than we can in 100 days. But look – I live in California and it’s a blue state. I would encourage MUNA fans, if they’re in a state that’s red, go vote for Kamala. But I’m not jazzed, let me say that much.” 

Between her political work and music, life’s a little hectic for Katie Gavin right now. But she’s always been adamant that this stint in the solosphere could only happen if it didn’t interfere with MUNA. “I don’t want to let the fans freaking out weigh on me, but I do want to give them a new MUNA record really soon,” she says, generously. “So I’m now basically on cycle and off cycle at the same time. I’m writing the new MUNA record, promoting this one – and we have a podcast, so I spent a couple of hours today recording that. I’m spinning a lot of plates.” 

Back in July at Pitchfork Music Festival, Gavin joined another hero, Alanis Morrisette, on stage to sing ‘Ironic’. “I was just on stage singing with her, holding her hand and staring into her eyes like, ‘I’m gonna start crying!’” she recalls. “It was really intense, but honestly, it just made me think how fucking cool would it be to be 50 and touring with MUNA and to sound that good. 

“The thing about getting older,” she posits, as our time together wraps up, “is that you have time to keep getting fucking better.”