Series: Behind the Music Part 1
Sep 12, 2025In this two part series, Kat & Sarah will be, individually, unpacking and sharing about their upcoming releases. We hope that this will help inspire you to create and make music and share it with others as well!
This first installment if about Kat's latest release.
As I was releasing the four singles I put out in 2024, I started thinking about goals for myself and what I wanted to do as a next project. My first goal was to release new music every year. The obvious question that first arose was: How will I pay for that? Enter my own production journey.
In my capacity teaching songwriting at Berklee, I'm continually inspired and awed by the level of production and songwriting craft that my students bring into class. My journey as both a producer and a guitarist has been relatively short in the larger scheme of my career - 5 years of the last 30... Yes. That's right. I started playing guitar and learning how to produce during the pandemic - those were my 'pandemic projects'. I took some guitar lessons with a friend and some production lessons with a former student who is a professional producer at this point and off I went. Anyways, because my students are always bringing in work that I also need to assess and give feedback on - not just on the song, but also on how all the elements support the song (prosody) I was inspired to learn more about production so that I could share more detailed feedback about their work.
The way to do that, for me, was to do it. In other words, Produce my own project. Which leads me to my current project: Normal. Starting in January, I chose five songs that I felt went together both sonically, and as a vulnerable peek into my story and journey and started considering how to exactly go about creating an EP. My skills at this point are pretty solid. I can record and tune my voice, play guitar, do comps and edits and I know how to work drum machines and manipulate samples, utilize Splice...so I felt I had enough tools and skills at my disposal to accomplish my goal. The question for me at that point was whether I would mix it or not. I started getting all the basic tracks in - lead guitar and lead vocal. Then added background vocals (when you listen to the EP, you'll discover that the bgvs are a huge part of the sound of the record). I wanted to go for something sonically between Bon Iver, Lizzy McAlpine and Joni Mitchell. So I aimed.
My gig at Berklee has me in Boston and away from all my equipment during the week, so the only time I had to record and work on this was weekends - and it's honestly one of the harder things I find to get myself motivated to do. I love writing songs, love practicing, love playing with other people...but sitting down in front of a computer and creating, setting up my recording studio (which is my bedroom) and making sure all the things are connected right (there were so many times I had to check the gain staging on my guitar....) well, that's not always something I want to do. Enter Michael Leonhart. I hired him to hop on Zoom with me every few weeks - both as help with the arranging/production part, but also as an accountability person - to keep me working and give me 'tasks' to accomplish before a next meeting. Invaluable choice. He helped me feel good about my choices, lifted me up when I got stuck and just made the whole process WAY more fun. I think when we watch people make things, we think they actually do it all alone...but that has not been my experience....
Slowly the songs started to take shape. I started to trust my arranging skills (after much trial and error) and started to actually enjoy and be excited about what I was hearing. I got a little lost and stuck in the weeds at one point and called Sarah Gulish - she was incredibly kind and listened to all the songs, gave me some ideas as to what wasn't working and what was - and just helped push me over the little mountain I'd run into. She's a WHIZ at arranging and hearing nuance, just in case anyone reading this wants to know - and has had way more experience arranging than I have. I've actually spent the largest amount of my career collaborating with my band on arrangements - so doing them all alone was...well, scary.
In about May, I realized that even though I could do some rough mixing of the tracks, I just was getting frustrated trying to get them to sound the way I envisioned. So, I decided that that particular goal - of mixing my own work - would need to wait (or never happen...I also discovered I didn't really enjoy that part of the process). So, I called Aaron Nevezie, producer, engineer and studio owner extraordinaire. He'd engineered my last full album Dead Reckoning, and I'd wanted to work with him since then - but just hadn't had a project. This was it. I hired him to do a live mixing session with me for this EP over three days.
I got all the tracks finished, tuned, timed and all the things and bounced all of them out, uploaded them and sent them off to Aaron in advance of our meeting so he had everything. Then, in July (remember I started this in January) we got together for three days at The Bunker in Brooklyn and mixed the record. He kindly answered all my questions and well, the EP sounds like what I imagined it would sound like. Then, also at The Bunker, Alex DeTurk mastered it - and it's lush, beautiful and haunting in places while simultaneously uplifting and just well, to me, incredible.
I'm super excited that it will be out in the world in November. The first single, Once Upon a Time, drops on September 12, the second, Heartbreak Divide on October 10 and the whole EP, Normal, drops on November 7th. I've included pre-save links for everything below - which is part of a release plan if you're unfamiliar with that. Pre-saves help artists get on playlists, which in turn helps people find their music, which in turn can lead to more financial return on investment - so that's why you're always seeing artists ask you to pre-save :) In addition, if you're in the New York area and would like to hear these, and other, songs played live by myself and my band, I'm doing a show on October 26th in New York City. You can purchase tickets through the link below.
In talking about this post with Sarah, we were discussing how much this kind of thing is important for us as educators - to show up as our authentic and whole selves for our students. Sharing our work. Sharing that we are doing the work. Sharing all the same ups and downs and being able to relate to them in a more holistic and personal way. For me, I learned a lot more about production and arranging and mixing and feel even more equipped to give feedback to my students on these elements of their songs. I feel empowered and proud that, at the age of 49, I've developed a new skill that I can now use to create more music (because yes, I'm already working on the next project). I've read so many sad stories about educators not showing up - or feeling they couldn't show up - as their authentic selves in whatever context they were working in - and it's just heartbreaking. I know that I am incredibly lucky to have been afforded the ability to, by and large, show up as my whole self and to be able to own that for both myself and my students. I know this is not always everyone's experience.
But, gosh, what if it could be? Wouldn't that be amazing?
Pre-Save Codes:
Tickets for the release show in NYC
Scotch, Stories & Songs: A Release Show
