Katie Gavin Went Solo, But Not Alone

It’s not often that an artist goes solo when their band is at a commercial and critical apex, but Katie Gavin releasing What a Relief in-between the third and fourth MUNA albums was a concerted plan. “I had a group of songs that felt like an album at the beginning of the pandemic,” she says. “That’s when a lot of it started coming together. There was a period of time where we thought that the solo record would come out before [MUNA]. And, obviously, if you look back at that time, that wasn’t a time when we were necessarily doing, like, amazing work. But [What a Relief] just wasn’t ready.” With a not-so-right timing and MUNA’s popularity beginning to surge once they left RCA for Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records imprint of Dead Oceans, Gavin had no choice but to lend her full focus to her band. “Ever since I knew that I was going to do it eventually, the vibe has just been more like, ‘I have these other songs that aren’t in the MUNA world, but I want them to be out in the world.’” When it comes to What a Relief, it’s a matter of people having the music rather than Gavin attempting to jump-start another career.

Gavin and I are huddled together backstage at Pitchfork Music Festival mere hours before MUNA is set to play a 6:15 PM set in Chicago’s Union Park. After that performance, the band will return to the stage and perform “Ironic” with headliner Alanis Morissette, and Gavin will supply harmonies. It all feels fortunate and correct, that MUNA has become mixed into Jagged Little Pill’s 29-year legacy—as Gavin’s What a Relief takes numerous cues from Morissette’s emotional wreckage-mining blueprint. When they bring the house down, however, few people know that the MUNA frontperson is venturing into non-MUNA waters, picking up instruments like the fiddle and a Shruti box, and collaborating with folks like her old college friend Eric Radloff and the Japanese House’s Amber Bain on a collection of 12 tracks under her own name.

But Gavin’s bandmates, Jo Maskin and Naomi McPherson, have brazenly thrown their support behind her new venture, posting about lead single “Aftertaste” on their Instagram pages and helping swirl the buzz. They also performed quite a few instrumentals on the record—a closeness you don’t always see when a vocalist goes their own way. “It means everything, they are my best friends,” Gavin says. “I’m really, really lucky. I hope that I never take for granted that they just want me to do what’s right for me at whatever point in time.” In her words, MUNA are in a phase where, now more than a decade after forming, they are now seeing the rewards of growing together as a band and holding that supportive space for one another. “When you’ve been in a relationship for that long, you have to learn how to let each other grow,” Gavin continues. “Sometimes, that can feel scary, because it’s like, ‘Are you growing away from me?’ We all have experienced that, as a band. There are times where someone has to venture out on their own. It’s become a pillar of what makes MUNA work.”

At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, 1-800-On-Her-Own, the documentary about Ani DiFranco, Gavin was a moderator for a post-premiere screening Q&A with the 56-year-old, ahead-of-her-time DIY zealot. “I have a lot of grief when I think about Ani sometimes, because I made different decisions,” Gavin told Paste earlier this summer. “I am signed to a record label and I don’t own my own music.” It’s serendipitous that, as What a Relief’s release began approaching, Gavin and DiFranco crossed paths. “Getting to touch base with an elder, it felt very special,” Gavin says now. She didn’t start listening to DiFranco’s music until she was in her 20s. “When I was first shown her,” she says, “I was in the closet. Her voice scared me a lot, so I was like, ‘Not yet.’ I think I was really trying to fit in, and she’s such an outlier. When I left home and that facade I had put up fell apart, that’s when I turned to those women and discovered their music in a new way.”

Then, Gavin discovered Morissette, Tori Amos and Tracy Chapman. All of a sudden, everything clicked into focus—and meeting DiFranco filled her with long-desired and long-earned gratitude. “She really had a hard road and was such a trailblazer and didn’t do things the easy way,” Gavin explains. “She really took the long way. And I don’t think that, for her, it’s always been very forgiving. I think my fantasy with meeting Ani was that I would find that it all paid off for her. And, I don’t think that that is necessarily true. She never signed to a record label. She owned her own label, but she had an ex-boyfriend of hers that was running that label and mismanaged her money. If you’re not getting fucked with by the man, you’re often getting fucked with by a man. That was emotional. I was just like, ‘Oh, this is just another human who’s trying to figure it out.’” When Gavin began making What a Relief, she took DiFranco’s truths to heart: “I think that she has it really right, in that the most rewarding parts of being an artist are being in the magic of creating art and finding other people. She just likes being among other creative people; she doesn’t put herself on a pedestal at all. And that’s been something fun about the solo project, because it feels like I’m not just an alter-ego, larger-than-life. I get to just be a songwriter.”

Gavin has described What a Relief to be “Lilith Fair-core,” a reclamation of the Sarah McLachlan, Dan Fraser and Terry McBride-founded summer music revival that celebrates the good parts of OG feminism—especially celebrating people of marginalized genders who are expressing themselves in ways that go well beyond themselves as objects. “Lilith Fair-core” is about women portraying themselves as complex people. “We’re taking out any TERFiness and racism that is associated with first- and second-wave feminism,” Gavin explains, before pointing at her own ensemble. “It’s natural hair; it’s maxi skirts or micro miniskirts. It’s boots; anything that’s pagan, witchy stuff. Herbalism with a folk slant.” We pause for a moment, as MJ Lenderman walks by and says hello. “There is a part of me in MUNA that loves the ‘Brat Summer’ of it all, but it’s ultimately not exactly who I am—especially at this point in my life. I’m more like, ‘Let’s have a bonfire.’”

An impetus for What a Relief formed when Phoebe Bridgers introduced Gavin to Tony Berg, who’s worked on records by Taylor Swift, boygenius and Andrew Bird—but she and Berg didn’t click immediately. “I don’t know if I was standoffish, you’d have to ask him, but I’m definitely spoiled,” she admits. “Working with my two best friends, who are my queer contemporaries, I felt nervous to work with an older white guy. It took us a minute to understand each other.” Berg and Gavin did a couple of sessions together, working on early demos of What a Relief, but nothing was coming together. After taking a break, Gavin tearfully confided in him. “I said, ‘You have to be gentle with me if I can work with you. I know I might seem like I am this really confident person, but this is nerve-wracking for me to do. And it’s really vulnerable.’” In that conversation, Berg and Gavin came to the conclusion that they needed to work on every song from scratch. It’s the pivot that allowed the two to find mutual trust. “It was very healing to have a real relationship with this older man,” Gavin declares. “Who would have fucking thought?”

While their musical partnership doesn’t, on paper, seem so obvious, Berg was the right person to nurture Gavin’s desire to “make great music that doesn’t sound like anything else.” “He has these very visceral, almost childlike reactions to songs,” she says. “The last song on the record, ‘Today’—which he calls ‘The Kitchen Song’—I played it for him, and I thought that song was a very hopeful song, but he interpreted it as being this very hopeless song.” The What a Relief songs are ambivalent, toeing a blurred line between joy and melancholy. Berg saw “Today” as an image of a “woman who is realizing that she has wasted her life and is alone.’” “He was like, ‘I want you to go into the kitchen of the studio. We’re going to record you walking around on your own,’” Gavin explains. “I basically did an acting scene and he recorded it. It was just that type of thing I would not do on my own, but he took me to that place of ‘You are creating something completely original, just fully commit and go there.’ I was fumbling around the kitchen; at the very end of the song, that’s when a train came by and that’s the last sound on the record. It ended up being this magical moment.”

The “hardware and software” Gavin and her collaborators are using is so often the best determinate of what project every composition winds up on. While most MUNA songs—except for “Taken” and “Kind of Girl”—often begin on Ableton, with McPherson sending Gavin a beat to write lyrics over or the trio working through an arrangement together, “Aftertaste” is the only What a Relief track that didn’t come together on Gavin’s acoustic guitar. Both formats are, to her, routes she’s likely to take because of muscle memory. There are chord clusters she gravitates to, often based on the notes that are available to her on a computer keyboard or a guitar fretboard—and both impose physical restrictions. “But I think that can also be a good thing that determines your sound,” Gavin affirms.

While the songs on MUNA’s last two albums were written in close proximity to when they were released, much of What a Relief was written years ago—the oldest song, “Casual Drug Use,” dates back as far as 2017 and may have, in another life, wound up being a MUNA composition. On a track like “Sketches,” Gavin sings about a relationship she’s been away from for some time now. But she doesn’t feel the urge to counteract that feeling by giving it a modern-day touch-up—even if she’s no longer the same person who wrote it. “In my experience so far as a songwriter, I generally write about experiences a little bit better once I am a certain amount of time removed from them,” she says. “I find that I can’t see, really, what’s going on until I’ve had some space—especially if it’s about a relationship that is emotionally distressing. Sometimes that’s fascinating to hear, from someone who’s inside of something, but I think, on a lot of this record, there’s a little bit of distance there. Sometimes, that’s actually how you can be more honest about what’s really going on.”

Gavin notably penned “Aftertaste” on the same day as “Silk Chiffon,” though only the latter became a MUNA song. “They didn’t want [‘Aftertaste’] initially,” Gavin quips. “Then, we had worked on it more for the solo record and it was starting to come together and Naomi and Jo were like, ‘Maybe we should use that as a MUNA song.’ But, by that point, I was like, ‘I kind of need it for the solo record, because I need a single.’ Honestly, it probably could be a MUNA song.” Could “Aftertaste” end up in a MUNA set, à la how Big Thief sometimes performs Adrianne Lenker’s solo material? “The thing about MUNA shows is that we really like to bang it,” Gavin admits. “How many songs on the solo record could really be giving us that level of energy? Maybe ‘Aftertaste,’ maybe ‘Casual Drug Use.’ But I don’t think there’s that many true bangers.”

The unsung hero of What a Relief is “As Good As It Gets,” the final song Gavin wrote for the album that will endure as its anchor of clarity—a mark that tends to the comforts, mundanity and hardships of age-old love. “You’re always afraid that your best song was written 10 years ago,” she says. “But, it was a song that I wrote for somebody that I was still in a relationship with, and we were having a hard moment. I meant it as a love song, but we actually ended up breaking up a couple weeks after I wrote it. Then, after we broke up, I showed the song to a couple of my other friends. They were like, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t know that you were gonna break up, based on this song.’” To this day, Gavin doesn’t think “As Good As It Gets” is a sad song, though she understands why some people might. “I have so much imagination and fantasy about what love is going to do for me that a lot of my growing up has actually just been understanding that, in reality, long-term love looks different and, maybe, I just have to adjust my expectations,” she continues. “It’s been really special to have conversations with people about that song. I learn about what people think about love through their response to that song.” It was Bridgers who suggested to Gavin that “As Good As It Gets” should be a duet, so she shot for the moon and, while working out at the gym, texted the track to Mitski, who responded five minutes later that she loved it and wanted in.

There is so much intimacy on a record like What a Relief—it’s a contagious, honest reflection of affection. On “The Baton,” Gavin writes about intergenerational healing being a relay race. As a non-binary person who has a close relationship with their mom and can see the fractures she and I share, there is something rewarding about hearing the details of a queer songwriter’s interior life—especially details delivered through such graceful reckoning. “I think I have been trying to write about family in a way that really gives people their whole humanity,” Gavin says. “What I like about that is that it acknowledges that my parents and my grandparents have these limited capacities in different ways, but I also have that. And, if I have kids I’m gonna do the same thing. I’m not special for being affected by that; I’m a part of this grand design.”

Then, on the country-inflected “Inconsolable,” Gavin’s lens turns to an interrogation: What does it mean to come from a household that lingered without closeness, where “We don’t know how to be helped” turns into “We don’t know how to be held”? “All I can do is try and take it a little bit farther than wherever they brought me,” she affirms. “I like that idea of being grateful—that image of seeing my mom running, and acknowledging how hard she has tried to raise the best people that she can raise. I’m sad and I want her to come with me, but I know that that’s just not how it works. But I’m not interested in name-calling or laying blame at this point. It’s more like, ‘How can I acknowledge what you did your best at and how can I heal the stuff that you weren’t able to heal?’” It’s a culture of bridges mended, of accountability bleeding into the margins of acceptance.

What a Relief is such a deeply earnest, empathetic and personal album that captures exactly what a solo debut is supposed to by introducing us, in full, to Katie Gavin. They say you have your entire life to write your first record, and Gavin certainly took full advantage of that. “I thought more that I knew who I was before I embarked on this process of recording the solo record,” she says. “Now, I’ve surprised myself in so many new ways that I have that really young feeling of ‘I can be anything.’” She and MUNA are working on another record, and she can feel the heights, tricks and attitudes of What a Relief already leaving a mark on those rehearsals. “You know how you can fall into prescriptive roles when you’re in a long term relationship? We have our version of that,” Gavin furthers. “I think working on the solo record and playing with new things and opening new doors, I’m taking that into MUNA. It’s going back to this playful nature of ‘Oh, I can do whatever I want—as long as it feels right.’ The goal is that this is actually something that ends up being good for the band, and I think it will be.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.