On the album cover for singer-songwriter Katie Gavin’s solo debut album, What A Relief, she sits half-dressed in the middle of her shiny, sage-green bedspread with various clothes and possessions strewn around her and the floor; even the cat stands awkwardly mid-sit or stand, it’s hard to tell. The immediacy of this messy in-between moment conveys the intimacy Gavin reaches to again and again on the album.
I want you to see me
When you’re not looking
I want you to fuck me
When we’re not touching
The album’s opening track, “I Want It All,” exhumes a lust for connection so all-consuming she knows already, “I’m gonna lose my mind / I’m gonna lose…” But it’s also Gavin’s thirst for and attention to these acutely relatable moments of humanity that render the album enticing.
“I’m really hungry for connection. And I think that in putting out songs that express that, or putting out images that express that, and having it met with understanding gives me that experience of like ‘we’re all humans having a human experience,’” Gavin says. “I want to push myself in terms of what I allow other people to see.”
Much of Gavin’s career has been with pop band MUNA (who opened for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour earlier this year). Solo, Gavin sheds her dazzling pop-star persona and the trappings of MUNA’s spectacular auditory and stage presence, retaining their honesty and emotional precision. What A Relief, which was produced by Tony Berg, is a collection of 12 songs Gavin wrote on the side over the past seven years. With them, and a clarity born of self-assurance and yearning for connection, Gavin pulls up a chair to settle in for a heart-to-heart with her audience.
“Some days you do your best / Some days you do what gets you out of bed…” Gavin sings on “Casual Drug Use,” possessing an inscrutable ability to pinpoint reality neatly and poignantly. That realism remains throughout the album, which unfolds as a masterful look at the human condition through the micro view of Gavin’s relationships with the world, herself, and others. Many times, she sounds so thrillingly close to the microphone it’s as if she’s singing right into your ear.
As she winnows down her experiences to a few kernels of truth, Gavin deliberately and deftly seeks accessibility and relatability without catering to weirdness or discomfort simply to make a point. “I am pleased with the same chords, over and over, as long as there’s a story and someone is saying something compelling,” she explains.
Her lack of pretense serves as shorthand for her palpably raw portraits of life: “But I think this is as good as it gets, my love/ I think this is as good as it gets/ Pray to god that you think that it is enough…” she sings in “As Good As It Gets” – which features guest vocals by Mitski – about a relationship that is not always a fairy tale. It’s an acknowledgement that you can both love someone and be underwhelmed by them, at least some of the time.
“‘As Good As It Gets’ reflects this big question that I’ve had for a long time, and I still have about what is reasonable to expect from a romantic relationship. And how good is it supposed to feel?” she says.
Elsewhere on the album, in “Sanitized,” Gavin carefully takes a wet washcloth to the bottoms of her dirty feet, afraid to stain her lover’s clean bed (“I lie perfectly still so I don’t mess up my hair/ I’m a sanitized girl, I clean up for you my dear”); or promises not to stalk her ex online, except “once in a while I’ll wanna know if you’ve died,” as she muses in “Keep Walking.”
Growing up in Illinois, Gavin’s parents gave her free reign to explore music and she gravitated unsurprisingly to pop music, entertaining preteen love for the Spice Girls and Samantha Mumba, and teen obsessions with Riot Grrrl, Gravy Train, and the Weepies’ “Gotta Have You.” She also gravitated toward queer, explicit music (Gavin is queer, but was in the closet at the time). When she started writing her own music as a teenager, her mother introduced her to Imogen Heap and her father stoked her folkie music interests with Jackson Browne and Jim Croce.
Gavin’s broad musical tastes inform her writing of course. In the case of What A Relief, she draws particularly on her love for John Prine’s flawed, human characters, and perverse, weirdo songster Loudon Wainwright III whose Attempted Mustache remains one of Gavin’s favorite albums.
“It’s the same magic that’s in a lot of John Prine songs, where these people aren’t afraid to talk about what real people experience in their real lives, even if it’s really silly, and then really mixing that with the profound.”
Silly mixed with the profound is perhaps the best possible description of Gavin’s own music. In the middle of the album, Gavin drops the bluegrass-folk portrait “Inconsolable,” about generational baggage’s impact on our well-being. Wrapped around a divinely-gratifying fiddle melody (she brought in Nickel Creek’s Sara and Sean Watkins to add a little extra bluegrass cred to the track) the song is first and foremost a reflection on learning to be vulnerable while falling in love.
It’s an experience that feels every bit as familiar as Gavin’s messy bed, but in a way that seems to make sense for the very first time – the gift of a stellar songwriter. More than that though, “Inconsolable” is a study in the way tiny moments elevate Gavin’s songs through her allegiance to the balance between silly and unvarnished experiences. We’ve all curled up on the couch hesitant to show how we’re really feeling.
But I’ve seen baby lizards running in the river
When they open their eyes
Even though no one taught them how or why
So maybe when you kiss me I can let you
See me cry
And if we keep going by the feeling
We can get by
Mid-verse, Gavin pivots from the endearing image of baby lizards learning to swim to emotional vulnerability in a fledgling relationship with the blockbuster realization that salvation and connection again might just come from that blind leap of trust.
Gavin’s quest for an honest examination of emotional intelligence stems in part from time spent with her grandparents, two of whom she lost in the last few years. Soaking up their stories, she thought about how much they endured and how many times older generations weren’t afforded a chance to be heard, or to feel their feelings.
Elders teach both by omission and by passing the torch. In “The Baton,” What A Relief’s anthemic third track, dedicated to the lineage of socially and generationally inherited womanhood, Gavin outlines her understanding of resilience as it passes from mother to daughter. Imagining what she’d say to her own daughter, Gavin also reaches to the wisdom from generations before her:
I’d pass her the baton and
I’d say you better run
‘Cause this thing has been going
For many generations
But there is so much healing
That still needs to be done
Not for rebellious reasons, but rather to instill a deep love of self, by the end of the song, Gavin’s come out the other side as her own mother.
“It’s a sense of learning, a sense of ownership and agency and learning to really listen to myself and trust myself, like if I’m going into a situation that I’m nervous about,” she explains. That’s a transformation not unlike her experiences writing the album, which she started when she was 24 and concluded at the age of 31: “You’re kind of moving from this archetype of maiden to mother.”
“I’m aware of a younger part of me that might be nervous and might have needs,” she says. “I often talk to her and say, ‘I got you, you’re coming home with me.’ And, ‘You don’t need to worry that I’m gonna forget about you or give you away to somebody else, or make you tap dance for somebody else.’”
Part of mothering yourself is finding your pitfalls and learning to prevent them. For Gavin, that includes thinking about addiction a lot, well beyond drug use.
“I can get addicted to a lot of different things; I can get addicted to different processes; I can get addicted to people; and I can get addicted to looking at furniture on Facebook marketplace,” she says. “I was thinking about this idea that when we as humans get stuck in the process of addiction, the things that make us feel good, and our actual relationship with the world gets smaller and smaller.”
That idea became the song “Sketches,” wherein Gavin distills addiction into a two-dimensional study of self reduction. In a simple acoustic guitar and cello-accompanied track, she imagines her character reduced to a sketch by an overbearing relationship: “That the deeper I’d go/ The smaller I’d get…” until she takes back control, painting herself back to size.
“The process of recovery has been really one of expansion, learning that I can feel intimacy and connection and pleasure and joy from so many different experiences in life and from so many different people,” Gavin says. “And there’s something that just feels very profound about that for me in this time.”
Even when it comes to writing about climate change, Gavin filters her stories through our relationships to one another. It feels more effective than shaming people for not recycling, she says. In “Sparrow,” she ruminates on the dangers of the quick fix, hoping in vain for the song of a sparrow in spring, only to discover that the tree it would perch on has died of a cure applied rashly and without thinking.
But perhaps Gavin’s most profound relationship moment on the album comes when she eulogizes her dog in “Sweet Abby Girl.”
“She’s taking up most of the mattress/ Can’t imagine being so un-self conscious/ She’s pushing her back up against my legs…” Abby becomes a foil for Gavin’s insecurities, as throughout the song she considers the vulnerability within unqualified love for another being.
Buried late in the album, “Keep Walking,” its penultimate track, reveals Gavin’s raison d’être: “What a relief / To know that some of this was my fault.” Superficially, it’s a breakup song. But it’s also a relief for Gavin’s to put these songs into the world, to share another side of herself, and forge new connections with listeners.
Fundamentally, we get through hard times by laughing with our friends, Gavin says. As she’s matured as a songwriter, she’s been drawn to including those moments of levity in her songs. Invariably, they feel like the best of conversations with friends and lend themselves well to What A Relief’s stripped-down, singer-songwriter format.
“There was just something funny about this idea of putting out this part of me that had up until this point been unexpressed; it does feel like a relief to just let it out,” Gavin says. “I like the sentiment in the song … ‘what a relief to know that some of this was my fault,’ which is just agency. I haven’t behaved perfectly, and that gives me some space to have compassion and forgiveness for you.”
“Real life” is such a tired phrase. Gavin’s version, though, feels scintillatingly, comfortingly relatable, and like her messy bedroom, gives the listener agency to let go and just be, too. What a relief.
Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius
