FEATURE: Spotlight: Katie Gregson-MacLeod

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Jaime Molina for The New York Times

Katie Gregson-MacLeod

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A fiercely independent artist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Meg Henderson

who is not afraid to hold back sharing what is inside her regarding music, I have a lot of admiration for Inverness artist Katie Gregson-MacLeod. I said recently how I have not featured many Scottish artists in my Spotlight features. There is so much incredible talent coming out of the country. I want to share a couple of recent interviews with the magnificent Gregson-MacLeod. Before that, in 2020, Medium spoke to the then-nineteen-year-old about her music and rise. It was clear, even at a time when the pandemic had shut things down, that she was an artist connecting with a lot of people:

“Katie Gregson-MacLeod is a nineteen year-old singer-songwriter from Inverness, Scotland. Although she would say her roots are acoustic pop-folk, she has branched out into a more indie-pop sound in the music she’s been releasing. Currently, she’s making music that she feels you can cry and dance to at the same time. By day she is also a history student at Edinburgh University.

Q. “When did music become an important part of your life? How did you know it was something more than just a hobby?”

A. “Music has always been one of the most important things in my life, I think. I’ve been singing and writing wee songs for as long as I can remember and started playing the piano and guitar at a young age too. I think I knew from childhood that I wanted a creative career, whether that be in music, film, or theatre but it wasn’t until early 2019 that I started to actively play gigs and immerse myself in the local music scene and beyond.”

Q. “What age did you start performing? Did you have stage fright? If so, how did you overcome that? If not, what was the scariest part about entering the music industry?”

A. “I’ve performed in choirs and musical theatre since I was really wee and it’s always been second nature for me. I don’t remember ever really having stage fright when performing and actually find that I’ve become more prone to getting nervous now that I’m older and it feels more serious. Last year, for instance, I played a Sofar show, which is super intimate, and the crowd was dead silent. I don’t think I’ve ever been more nervous. In cases like that, I just try to tell myself that nothing is too big a deal and that all I can do is try to have fun with it. To be honest, the scariest part about entering the music industry for me is the idea that no one will like my writing or want to listen to my work, which has already been proven irrational I guess.”

Q. What are your next steps as an artist?

A. “I am exploring a range of sounds right now and working on an EP to release next year, which will have my debut single on it. The songs I’ve chosen to put on the EP were all written this year and I’m really excited to share them as a collective. They’re also quite pop-esque, and I’m really an acoustic artist at heart, so once I’ve finished the first EP, I’d like to release some really stripped back folky stuff”.

2021 was a busy year for Katie Gregson-MacLeod. She released the Games I Play EP, and there was a lot of attention around her. I think, with the pandemic still restricting things, it was hard for her to strike and take full flight when it came to gigs and getting her music out there. Last year, she released the sensational E.P., songs written for piano. It features a song that has really blown up. The beautiful complex has sort of taken on a life of its own. The Line of Best Fit spoke with Gregson-MacLeod late last year. I have selected the segments where we discover her background and how she got into music:

“It's that appreciation and desire for storytelling that pushed Gregson-MacLeod into music—and it’s the part of Scotland that she’s taken with her now that her career is pulling her elsewhere.

First entering the Scottish scene at 16 in Inverness, she felt “disconnected” from other Scottish musicians in bigger cities. Eventually, she “weaseled her way” into a mentorship program for young Scottish artists and from there was exposed to the country’s broader music industry network as well as opportunities for paid gigs at pubs, festivals, and in support slots. “I was independent completely, like no label no manager and no one around me. So, it really was a case of like just try emailing people to get any gigs I can,” she remembers. Such is the game of being an independent musician in the era of DIY artists. Before signing, most have to act as their own managers, marketers, content creators, and, sometimes, producers. Gregson-MacLeod’s first single “Still a Sad Song”, which she released at 18, was self-produced and later featured on national radio. She went on to release her first body of work in mid-2021 with the “Games I Play” EP, a collection of indie-pop offerings. Though there are sonic differences in that first EP from Gregson-MacLeod’s latest offerings, the beginnings of a great writer and musician are clear even in those early works.

Eventually, Gregson-MacLeod made the move out of Inverness and into Edinburgh for university, where she studied history. “I think that just moving somewhere bigger and moving to a city was something I was always going to have to do,” she admits. “The moving to Edinburgh was very transformative … I was able to get different gigs and to really capitalize on being somewhere with stuff going on. I met the people that would become my band—not at uni but just around the scene—and also lots of music pals.” And while her degree might not have been in music, the studying still helped her process. She laughs as she remembers that her most productive writing sessions were always in the weeks when she had an essay deadline.

Now, she’s all but packed up once again, getting ready to make the move to London full-time and join the burgeoning new generation of artists and songwriters living there. Indeed, the friends she’s staying with as she calls me are musicians themselves, and after our call she’s going out with them to a Matt Maltese gig, someone she says she’s come to know well in recent months. Her friends, she says, have anchored her in this otherwise head spinning experience: “they’ve just been laughing with me the whole time.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Caity Krone

Still, moving away has its challenges. “I feel like I’ve sold my soul to England,” she tells me. “Like you go back and they’re all like: ‘Oh, you’ve come to grace us with your presence.’” Nonetheless, any chance Gregson-MacLeod gets to visit the highlands again, she does: “Just feeling that home turf again is really nice.” But for all the jokes, everyone she grew up with has done nothing less than cheer her on. Her home friends even joke that she goes back to visit too much. “They’re telling me to, like, ‘go live that life.’”

As she settles into London, Gregson-MacLeod has got her eye on the ball, determined not just to get swallowed and spit out in the wave of internet fame but to properly build on it instead. She’s already making the right moves. In support of “complex,” she’s released a music video that takes the form of an Edinburgh remake of the one Vanessa Carlton put out for “A Thousand Miles”.

I am going to wrap up soon. I think it is harder for artists like Katie Gregson-Macleod to gain as much traction as other artists. What I mean is that her music has this elegance and beauty that is not as bombastic as a lot of modern Pop. A lot of TikTok stars and Pop artists are getting big kudos, but the sheer depth and nuance of Gregson-Macleod’s music marks her out for long-term success. NME chatted with her about the song written for piano E.P. It is amazing to think that, as NME write, the young artist was going to go back to university before a certain song changed things:

“Few artists on Earth know how Katie Gregson-Macleod is feeling right now. In early August, the 21-year-old vocalist and pianist was working part-time at a coffee shop and preparing to return to university to study History. But, by the end of that month, she had blanketed TikTok with an early demo of her breakthrough track ‘Complex’, a candid and arresting piano-driven power ballad steeped in romantic malaise, where it went on to become one of the buzziest songs on the planet overnight.

The song has taken on a new life in the months that have followed, with Gregson-Macleod’s songwriting continuing to help her fans emotionally purge. Dialling in from her family home in Inverness, she tells NME about how she’s only now beginning to come back down to Earth following a recent whirlwind promo tour across the US. “I’m feeling emotional today, because someone tagged me in a post where their Spotify Wrapped data explained how they’ve listened to my song 2660 times,” she says, visibly tearing up through the camera lens. “I only released the song in late August! [‘Complex’] was only supposed to be a demo, so I can’t even fathom how it’s managed to go this far…”

NME: A handful of the songs on your new EP were written when you were a teenager. Why is now the right time to release them?

“I think these are songs that I’ve always been very personally attached to. I often dismiss my earlier music as being ‘young’ or ‘immature’, as I think that I’ve grown so much since then. But I think there’s something special about the perspective that you have at a younger age, or at least wanting to honour your outlook at different moments in your life. When you’re a teenager, there’s this kind of complete certainty that you have in your own worldview. Pretending I was always incredibly wise, or that I had all the knowledge that I have now, is something I’m trying to shed. I try not to change any lyrics to my songs because they are all unique to the time and place that they were written in – and I can’t ever replicate that.”

How do you strike the right balance in your music between nostalgia and looking towards the future?

“I have a tendency to delve into things from my past, and I’m not afraid to share whatever needs to come out of me. I’m currently working on writing more about the present moment, even if it’s so much harder to do. Maybe I need to start being more of an optimist and write about what I could be feeling in the future – it’s all a process. But it all goes back to everything that happened around ‘Complex’: that time sparked a level of complete uncertainty as to what’s happening in my life. It was such a positive thing to happen to me, but it was shocking to the point where I felt like the ground beneath me was always moving. I wrote quite a few songs around that time and they were all about looking for answers, including ‘White Lies’, which I wrote in that period. ‘Complex’ was all statements, and now I just write questions.”

How do you imagine the success of ‘Complex’ will shape the music you’ll write in the future?

“I’m really excited to see where this goes. I made music for a few years on the small budget I had, but now the world has opened up so much for me. I want to maintain what makes my music unique to me, but also take advantage of all the new doors being opened – it’s about finding that important balance. I’ve been growing a lot and that will come with changes as a musician, too. Maybe I’ll come out with a fucking hyperpop record! But seriously, I’m excited to just work on the songs that I wrote ages ago but never got the chance to make”.

If you have not discovered the wonderful music of Katie Gregson-MacLeod, then go and spend some time with it. An artist that is going to be among the most exciting and promising of this year, I hope that her music continues to grow and her success follows. She is an artist that, once heard, is hard to forget! I am fairly new to her music, but I have been compelled to explore it in depth and read interviews. She is a fascinating artist who will be making big moves…