ARTIST NAME: Katie Marshall

 

SONG TITLE: Down Here

 

ALBUM TITLE: The Great Unknown

 

RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2019

 

GENRE: Indie Pop/Electro Pop

 

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The latest Katie Marshall project includes plush productions of her trademark rich vocal melodies and addictive choruses.

 

Katie borrows the electronic pop sensibility of The Postal Service and the up-front, hooky vocals of Maggie Rogers while avoiding the sugary-sweet overload of mainstream pop.

 

Thickly layered harmonies and haunting themes surround her newest album, The Great Unknown, released in July 2019.

 

Katie Marshall has played in various indie-rock bands (Parts for all Makes, SKIRT, Kill-Me Kare Bare, Eve & The Apple, Corey Palmer and Lovetrade, The Katie Marshall Three-Oh), and has toured the country from Seattle to New York.

 

She has performed on TV’s “Drinking With Ian”, “Modern Rock Twin Cities,” and has been a featured artist on Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Local Show.”

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Discuss your composition and melody.

I tried to play with a couple of different themes with this album, exploring outside the traditional song structure and punctuating things with dissonance to feed into the over-arching themes of the record.

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State the name of your producer and elaborate on the song. Adrian Suarez produced ‘The Great Unknown.’ He took my unpolished demos of the tunes and really elevated everything, especially with the song “Down Here.”

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Discuss the lyrics of the song.

“Down Here” is about sitting in silence with a million things to say, and having it bubble up and eventually spill out in a big, messy explosion.

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Elaborate on your music career.

I’ve been playing music in one form or another since I was about 14.

 

I started in the solo/acoustic singer/songwriter world and really cut my teeth on stage as a solo performer.

 

I joined some heavier-hitting bands in my 20s and have been mostly playing in indie-rock bands since then, dabbling in studio work and jazz when the opportunities arise.

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Discuss your motive behind making music.

“Motive” implies that there is some conscious, controllable choice to make music. For me, writing music and performing it has always felt like an involuntary impulse that I am hard-pressed to ignore.

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Discuss your songwriting.

I usually write and record my songs all at once. Demoing my new songs has really become entwined with my songwriting process, to the point where I will have half-finished songs recorded and almost fully produced… only they’re missing several verses, or a bridge or something.

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Tell us your opinion on using rhymes dictionary or writing software to develop lyrics. 

There are a lot of tools out there to help us choose our words. I’m a big fan of language, so the thesaurus has always been a good friend to me. I think that a potential pitfall of using some of those tools is that songwriters can try so hard to sound clever that it really just comes off as trite. I try to think about whether or not I would actually say the sentence I’m putting in my song, and if it’s a no – that line needs to go. Look. I rhymed.

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Discuss the music industry.

It has changed a lot since I started making music. I love that there are so many more opportunities for independent artists out there.

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Elaborate on how you prepare yourself for a recording session.

Whiskey, mostly…

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Brief us on your preference in terms of tempo as in up-tempo, mid-tempo or slow tempo.

Whatever best suits the tone and subject of the song – there’s a place for everything I think.

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Discuss your shows or live performance.

I always prefer to be on stage with others, I’m kind of over the solo thing. I prefer to collaborate and share the experience with other musicians. Also, I have a nasty habit of strange and silly stage banter when I’m on my own… Not my most charming attribute, I’m afraid.

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Tell us the themes of most of your compositions.

Honestly, I had a hard year. I wrote a bunch of songs about my hard year. I wrote songs about the kind of love that makes your stomach flip, and love that makes you flip inside out: raw and vulnerable and sometimes broken. And then I recorded those songs and left it all in the studio. More than I’ve ever done.

 

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