An Interview with Katie Herzig (Part 1)

If you haven’t heard Katie Herzig’s music yet, you will soon. The August issue of Paste placed her on the “22 Up-and-Coming Artists You Ignore at Your Own Peril!“, and called her music “brightly textured acoustic pop that’s clever yet sincere, sunny but grounded”. In describing her latest album, “Apple Tree”, Billboard called it “an adventurous and playful album perfect for the triple A set”, and said that her work is “recorded with care and a bigness that transcends the potentially damning status of just being another girl in Nashville with a guitar.” Her songs have appeared on many television shows, including Grey’s Anatomy, One Tree HIll, Lipstick Jungle, and Ghost Whisperer, and her song “Look At You Now” was written for the Sex and the City movie and featured on volume two of the soundtrack.

Clearly, Herzig’s one to watch. Below is the first of a three-part interview, in which Herzig talks candidly about her creative process, making music in the Nashville community, and her latest effort, “Apple Tree”.

How did you get your start in music?

I grew up being involved in bands, orchestras, and choir.  In band I played percussion, but my Dad had a guitar at our house that he liked to play for fun, so I kind of dabbled; then my Dad gave me a guitar for my birthday during my senior year of high school.  It was a complete surprise, but it became a defining moment for me.

I went off to college and learned to play guitar by being surrounded by a lot of friends who played. My older sister Jenny majored in music in college, and what she went through terrified me because I dealt a lot with performance nerves, so I decided I was more interested in writing and creating. I minored in creative writing but graduated from my college’s journalism school with a degree in production, thinking I might make documentaries.

But that all evolved though into what I thought of as a degree in being in a band.  I had started a band called Newcomers Home during my freshman year with some friends, and it lasted through college and four years after; my dreams of doing other things faded, and I really just wanted to keep making music.

Do you still do anything with creative writing or documentary filmmaking?

I loved production, editing, photography, and filming, and a lot of that has crossed over into my music – editing and recording myself, working within Pro Tools, and mixing. Any writing outside of music comes in waves – I still love writing fiction, but I don’t spend much time doing it at this point in my life.

You started Newcomers Home, and you’re described as the frontman, but it didn’t originally start that way.

It didn’t start that way at all.  In the beginning, we were literally still learning how to play our instruments and writing songs for the first time, and I was a more timid performer. We all started singing the songs we wrote, so the other guys in the band would sing as well.

On our first little EP, we had multiple singers; afterward we recorded it, the band decided that I should be the singer. I’d spent so many years singing already, and the more I did it, the more comfortable I was.  We were kids finding our way into what would eventually become something that at which we could make a living.

You were still with the band when you recorded your first solo album, “Watch Them Fall.”  What prompted you to make the record?

When you write a song, and you like it, you hope that it will be heard and have a life of its own. I had all these songs, but we were all fighting for the band to do our songs, so I wanted to take the pressure off the band.

With the band’s albums, I was involved in the studio with the production process, so I felt it would be really fun to do it on my own, to see what I would do if I were the only one making these choices.  Chris Coleman, who co-produced “Watch Them Fall”, was in the band for a brief period of time. I always loved his production sense – he and I have similar taste and he’s good at making stuff up, and that’s essentially what you need when you have to build a song around a guitar vocal. He’s a great, great engineer, so we had always talked about doing something on the side together, but neither of us had much experience with production.

Chris never finished songs, but he would make these little one-minute songs and send them to me, and I always thought they were really cool. Anytime you work with a producer or another writer whose work you respect, you hope that it will rub off on whatever you’re doing. His melodies, love of layering, and intimate stacked vocals happened a little less on that record, but it was laying a foundation for what was to come.

Why did you take on sole producing responsibilities for your second album, “Weightless?”

The band was ending, and I knew that I was about to embark on a solo endeavor after that. When you’re in a band for eight years, and you make four records, and all of the decisions and the songs and the production is a group effort, you compromise to hear everyone’s opinions. I had done that for so many years that I wanted to see what it was like to have nobody between me and the mic.

I bought a Mac laptop and Pro Tools, thinking I would use it to demo songs and try out some production ideas and then head into a studio for a record, but as I started doing that I realized that I really liked the sound of those recordings and I could possibly make a record on my own. I had poked around, talking to different people, almost seeking permission to do something like that entirely on my own, and then I realized I didn’t need anyone’s permission. All I needed to do was just do it.

That decision was really freeing and exciting for me. It was the beginning of months of discovering what I would do on my own, and that’s what came out. I’ve been a “do-it-yourselfer” since then, so that record helped define where I was headed.

There’s a bit of a homemade feel to “Weightless – it’s not the cleanest of recordings. I wasn’t being nitpicky, doing ten takes on one vocal; I would sing the whole way through, play the whole way through, and then record around it.

When someone records an album in their bedroom you mostly hope no one can hear the dog’s toenails clicking on the kitchen floor, but “Weightless” is very hi-fi, even contrasted with other high-profile bedroom recordings like Iron & Wine’s “Creek Drank the Cradle.”

It’s interesting you mention “Creek Drank the Cradle” – that was actually the album I heard that made me think I could do it.  My initial instinct after writing most songs now is that I don’t need to go somewhere else to record it, but I’ll just do it on my own and start here.

A lot of what you liked about Chris Coleman’s one-minute songs seems to have carried over and really blossomed on “Weightless”.

Absolutely.  I adopted a lot of his approach. He also told me exactly what kind of equipment to buy, and he would help me with my technical problems.  He played a few things on the record and put some of his magical touch to it.

Our interview with Katie Herzig will continue next Friday.