Katie Gavin, front woman of the queer indie band Muna, was 10 years old when she started writing songs. “I have a lot of feelings and I’ve always been very expressive,” Gavin, whose debut solo project, What a Relief, is out Friday, tells Vanity Fair over Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. So when she was tasked by her fourth-grade music teacher with writing a song about their school mascot, she came up with something unexpectedly profound though not particularly peppy: “Soaring through the air / so lightly and freely / I feel like a brush and the world is my painting.” “That was my vibe,” she says with a smile as her cats, Zip and Button, zigzag across her living room. “Just a little girl being like, ‘I’ve got lots going on in my heart.”
That same music teacher continued to follow Gavin’s rising career but passed away a couple years ago. “I went back to my hometown and did an acoustic version of that song at her funeral,” Gavin says. “It was really special.” Particularly because it was people like this teacher, and Gavin’s parents, who encouraged her musical abilities. “It just meant a lot,” she says. “Being that type of kid, it’s not always fostered, but for me it was.”
Gavin went on to study popular music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles where she formed Muna with classmates Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson. Together, the band has been at the forefront of indie pop for the last decade, carving out a prominent space in the industry for music about queer love and longing. With three critically acclaimed albums in their repertoire, they have headlined international tours, performed the festival circuit with stops at Coachella and Lollapalooza, and grown their audience by opening for Taylor Swift on the Eras Tour. They’ve even added a podcast, Gayotic, that showcases the band’s dysfunctional but charming dynamic alongside guests like Trixie Mattel, to their oeuvre.
Still, imposter syndrome manages to creep in for Gavin. “Something I want to work on is my relationship to how much success we actually have had and actually letting it in and processing it and feeling gratitude for it,” she says, reflecting on her career. “I think I have a disease of just feeling perpetually on the outside or perpetually up and coming.”
It’s a mindset that has fueled her work ethic, but Gavin has already cemented herself as a prolific songwriter. First with the 2021 career-defining hit “Silk Chiffon,” which has over 80 million plays on Spotify, and now on her first solo record, What a Relief, where she brazenly veers into a new lane, finding her voice in a collection of songs that lay a raw, folk-inspired drape over Gavin’s already polished pop sensibilities.
Written over the course of the last seven years, the album started as part of what Gavin calls a “Muna discard pile.” Occasionally, she would bring a song to the band that ultimately didn’t feel reflective of the group and would file it away. But eventually, she started sharing those songs with other trusted collaborators like her friend, the musician Eric Radloff, for feedback. “We would just be having conversations and I would send him [songs] that were related,” she says. “That kind of fostered the beginning of a sense that there could be a life for these other songs.”
Then, right before the pandemic, Radloff invited Gavin to open for him at an intimate show in LA. “I just showed up and played the songs and it felt really good,” she says. That sense of connection encouraged her to keep the flame alive. “Then when the pandemic happened, Eric and my friend Scott [Heiner] and I started working on arranging the songs.”
That year, Muna, while working on their third album, was dropped from RCA records. It gave Gavin time to explore and find her footing as a solo artist, even while still working on a Muna album. Soon after, Phoebe Bridgers signed Muna to her independent record label, Saddest Factory Records. When Bridgers heard Gavin’s own demos, she paired Gavin with her producer, Tony Berg, to refine the record. They emerged with 12 tracks that reintroduce Gavin to her fans intimately, revealing her innermost desires and inviting them on her journey of self-discovery.
Described as “Lilith Fair-core,” by Gavin, the album reflects the music that she grew up with, and the female artists, like Tracy Chapman and The Chicks, who helped her navigate coming of age. “I had a real return to Tori [Amos] and Ani [DiFranco], the Indigo Girls, and Melissa Etheridge and all of those amazing artists in my 20s, kind of bleeding into the time when I started working on this album.” Gavin skillfully channels these influences and that expressive 10-year-old girl she once was, embracing her big feelings on romantic tracks like “Aftertaste,” “As Good as It Gets,” (feat. Mitski), and a hypnotizing standout track, “Sanitized.” In between Gavin’s exploration of self, she also examines familial bonds and generational trauma on “The Baton,” and “Inconsolable.”
