Tone Glow 116: Katie Dey
An interview with the Australian musician about authenticity and oversharing, making art that is helpful, stealing from other artists, and her new album 'never falter hero girl'
Katie Dey
Katie Dey is an electronic pop artist currently based in Melbourne, Australia. She’s been releasing solo music under her current moniker since 2015. Early projects like that year’s asdfasdf and 2016’s flood network introduced a luminous bedroom-DIY sound and a brooding voice that couldn’t contain all of its processing and formant-shifting. This led to moments of explosive catharsis on songs like “Fear O The Light,” Since then, Dey’s music has become more orchestrated and detailed, sharpening the garish textures of her MIDI instrumentation while giving her more space as a singer and lyricist. She’s dropped a total of, depending on how you count, ten projects, including two collaborative albums with close friend Devi McCallion of Canadian industrial pop duo Black Dresses. Her latest album never falter hero girl has some of her most saturated sound design and elaborate compositional ideas, with big, dramatic songs about learning to pick up life’s pieces. She fully produced, mixed, mastered and released the record herself.
H.D. Angel interviewed Katie Dey over Zoom on November 8, 2023. Ms. Dey was mildly sick, but the interview proceeded as scheduled. Between sips of tea, she answered some tangential questions about living in Australia and her overall outlook.
H.D. Angel: I know you’re currently in Melbourne. Did you grow up there?
Katie Dey: No, I grew up in a place in New South Wales in Australia called Port Macquarie and then moved to Melbourne when I was 18.
Can you tell me about what it was like growing up in New South Wales?
Well, aside from my home life—which was, you know, complicated—it was pretty isolating, I guess. Port Macquarie is kind of a retirement/surfing town, so it has like eight beaches and it’s full of condos. So not much in terms of youth culture or any kind of art culture. It’s probably why I gravitated towards the internet as my main method of finding friends and stuff.
What was that move like: going out on your own at 18?
Well, it was a learning experience. It was partially due to necessity just from unsafe situations. I don’t want to get into that, but yeah, it was rough. I was able to handle myself, but you know, I got into some pretty bad places when I moved out. When you have no real support network, you end up falling into various traps.
Can you tell me a bit about Melbourne for an outsider? What’s the vibe?
What is the vibe? I guess Melbourne is kind of notorious for being the place where arty people move to. I feel like it’s rare to find people who grew up here. Maybe it’s kind of like Australia’s New York in that way, where it’s a bunch of aspirational people. But it’s nice. There is a lot of availability for work for a musician, more than I think anywhere else in the country. It can have bad vibes. The winter time is rough here. It gets very cold, and the summertime is also rough.
Do you feel like you’re part of a scene?
When I moved here, when I was 18, I was playing in punk rock bands and stuff. I feel like that type of music and that kind of community—going to punk rock shows and doing a bunch of drugs and getting very drunk—has a tendency to foster community for whatever reason. Maybe it feels like family. Anyway, it’s like… I have very scattered friends in terms of musicians and art people now, but it feels a lot more individualistic, I would say. When you have aspirations of being a pop star, it’s less about hanging out with your friends and helping people. But there is still some of that. It’s not terrible.
Was there anything specific that you felt like made you dissatisfied with that early punk musical culture, that got you on the path you’re on now?
Well, it was obviously very toxic—not that all communities don’t have their fair share of toxicity, and I guess maybe this isn’t that isolated to punk music. Because just recently, this could just be a me problem, but I made the choice to fully commit to not drinking or doing drugs or smoking. I think it’s partially due to the fact that I’ve started doing a lot more shows and live performances. And it’s customary, I suppose, at small, local live performances, [for them to] give you free drinks, and it’s just part of the package. That very quickly started feeling a lot like me being an alcoholic and a drug addict back when I was like 18, 19 years old. Also, punk rock has this masculine sort of tendency, to be very boyish, boy-focused. I didn’t particularly feel like I fit in super well.
I know you’ve said in previous interviews you’re a bit of a homebody. How do you spend your days? What’s a day for you?
Well, I have a tendency to have wild swings in my day-to-day activity, and in the frequency of activities during a day. So when I’m feeling extremely depressed, my days are usually just sitting around and looking at YouTube, but on better days, I’m working on music and going to events and seeing people and, you know, hanging out with my friends and trying to become inspired by things, reading about the world.
Are there any big spots in the area—not to share too much, but places you like to go?
First, I would be kind of worried [about that]. But on the other hand, I don’t super feel connected to any specific spots anymore. Like, I don’t know if I have a regular haunt, you know? I also just don’t get out as much as I used to. I’m getting old. I’m old and chronically ill and chronically pained. So going out is a challenge for me. I especially don’t feel motivated right now when I’m miserably sick.
What do you watch on YouTube then? What’s your YouTube diet?
Oh God, that’s so embarrassing. Well, let’s have a look (glances at monitor). For a while there, I guess during the pandemic, a lot of people tried to get into cooking and I just started obsessively watching cooking shows on YouTube, but it’s less of that these days. Got into video essays, as we all have indulged in. Some of those are real good. What else have we got here? Jerma compilations. Love him.
Can you share a bit about your housemates and your friendships with them? Because I know two of them participated in making the cover art.
Yeah. My friend Jemi Gale, she made the painting, did the whole painting, and Callie Elizabeth Birchall, she photographed it. She hung it up in our sunroom and took photos. They’re my best friends. I wouldn’t know where to start with them. Jemi is an incredible artist, beautiful person, my… comfort animal (laughs). Callie is also an incredible artist, a tattoo artist—if anyone reads this and they need a tattoo artist in their studio, you should hire her. A multidisciplinary, diploma-having, beautiful woman. And I also have another housemate, but she probably doesn’t want to be involved.
How’d you meet them?
Well, me and Callie dated briefly and then I met Jemi through Callie. That’s all I can divulge.
Sure. What about, like, your house itself? What’s it like there?
Well, it’s pretty old, it’s pretty beaten up. It happens to be very, very cheap rent, and they still haven’t evicted us or decided that they wanna knock the place down to build apartments yet, so we’re here for the time being. It has an enormous front and back yard that none of us have the capacity to mow on a regular basis. So yeah, maybe… shit, if you actually do want to come and find me and kill me, then just look for a house in Melbourne with an overgrown lawn. That’s me (laughter). It’s beautiful. It’s artistically inspiring. It’s what I always dreamed a share house could be. I’ve lived in a lot of terrible, terrible share houses in my life, and now I’m finally in one where I feel comfortable and happy and I enjoy the company of all the people in the house. It’s kind of a dream situation, you know, to be living with your best friends.
Do you believe in the whole “queer chosen family” thing?
Not for me. I wouldn’t hold it against anyone for having that for themselves. But it’s like, not all of us in this house would comfortably identify themselves as being queer. And I wouldn’t personally use that label for myself, and you know, not to be discourse-y about it, but my personal idea of and relation to what a family is, I don’t have a positive association with it. So I prefer to just be like, “they’re my best friends.” I think that’s beautiful as it is.
A lot of the new record, never falter hero girl, concerns self-acceptance and learning to love yourself despite your flaws and your weaknesses. Is there any moment you can think of when you realized you had to do that and treat yourself better? Like, any point of realization?
I’m trying to think if there’s a specific point… I guess usually, with albums, you write these songs over such a long period of time that it’s usually over a period of actual personal growth; you realize afterwards what the songs are about. At least that’s my experience. It’s like, the reason why it feels like a process of going through something is because it was something I went through. It was less a specific point in time and more of a long process of realization—that’s not really over, either, but it’s just like, at some point you have to stop, you know? And I wanted to capture if I had realized something about myself, even if it was in retrospect. I wanted to hold onto it and put it somewhere where I could keep it safe. Because usually, my experience a lot of the time is that you can have these big moments of realization about self-betterment, or figuring out something about your relationship with the world and with other people, but then a couple of years later, you’ll just forget it! And you have to realize it all over again. And maybe that’s what the songs are for.
How long ago did you start making this one?
Let me think. Well, “upstream” is the oldest one on there. And… (looks at monitor) I’ll see if I can find the earliest file. It’s never fully accurate, because sometimes you’ve been holding on to the bits of lyrics and stuff for a long time. Gosh, I don’t know. I uploaded a version of “upstream” to my Patreon maybe close to a year ago at this point. So yeah, approximately November last year.
Would you mind sharing what’s been going on since then for you, to motivate that whole process you talked about that the album captured?
Let me think of a way to say it without giving too much away. It’s like, sometimes you write songs about real people, and you don’t necessarily need them to know that it’s about them. And also, you want to keep the ability for other people to read their own meaning into stuff. That’s a boring answer. I guess I just met some people, and they made me confront certain things about myself. It’s that feeling of meeting someone and you can feel that the reflection of their personality is somehow changing you or making you conscious of things that you weren’t aware of about your own personality. It’s just been a beautiful process. I don’t know if I have a very specific or coherent answer about it.
You mentioned wanting to keep things in your music a little ambiguous so that people could project things onto them. Do you feel like as your career has progressed, you’ve changed how much you share about yourself with your audience?
Yeah, it’s definitely changed. Initially, I would share almost nothing about myself and didn’t have lyrics or anything. I was all in on people projecting shit onto the songs. And then I guess I sort of went drastically in the opposite direction, and started sharing maybe a little bit too much about myself. And as is generally the case, when you share too much about yourself, people can start to, you know, use that against you, or start being weird to you. So I think I’ve pulled that back a little bit as of late. You can’t give your whole self away all of the time. Or, as an artist, I guess you only want to give specific things. You don’t necessarily want to give the best of you or the worst of you. You just want to give specific things.
I personally want my art to be helpful to other people, and not just work as some sort of mode of egoistic expression, where I’m imprinting who I think everyone else should think that I am onto themselves. I’m just like, “here’s things that have been helpful to me in my life,” and that’s all I really want to give anyone. I don’t want to be unhelpful.
Do you believe that authenticity is real? Like, is there a “self” in your music you’re trying to get at? Or is it more about things just coming together in the process of making something?
I don’t know if authenticity necessarily needs to be the goal of music, or of art in general. If I somehow managed to write a song where it’s just like, “this is so me” or “this is exactly who I am as a person,” I don’t know if that interests me, necessarily. That kind of stuff is my business, you know? I want to keep myself to myself for the most part. I guess I have a bit of a pet peeve with authenticity, where it’s that thing of like, people thinking singing only has worth if there’s no AutoTune and there’s no vocal processing, and it has to be “real,” like quote-unquote real. But why? Like, do people interrogate that instinct about themselves?
I don’t know if I have anything particularly interesting to say about that, but a lot of my music I think is trying to push back against that specific idea, of the point of the music being the quote-unquote “musicianship”. Isn’t it more valuable as just: this is something that I decided I want other people to hear about me? Or not about me. This is something that I decided I want people to hear, full stop. I feel like that’s just more helpful.
I feel like a lot of music coverage, especially, can only really situate music in terms of, “this is what it says about the artist’s personal story that they’re baring their soul for,” and it’s less about craft and the choices they make.
Yeah. I find that so, so irritating. But it’s also so much easier to write about. It makes sense to me why so much music coverage is about the human aspect, or people’s stories, rather than the music itself. It’s because you can write a lot more words about someone’s real life. It also seems to just work. People tend to be more easily drawn to gossip, or stuff that’s very explicitly able to be related to their own lives. It’s hard to write a news article about something abstract. It both makes sense and is frustrating.
When you listen to music, what are you trying to get out of it? Like, what is your ear tuned into?
Well, I guess it’s become more complicated now that music is, like, my job. I think when I was younger, I used to go to music for connection, and feeling some kind of soothing quality for my loneliness. Which I would get by thinking, like, “Oh, this this person exists and that’s all that matters, that they exist and they hear these things in the world and they think that it’s valuable and beautiful,” and for whatever reason, that aligns with my experience and it also, for whatever unexplainable reason, sounds beautiful. That would ease my loneliness a lot as a kid.
But, you know, now that it’s my job, I’m just listening for shit to steal, I guess. It’s rare that I will get any kind of mystic experience with music, but sometimes it does happen. It’s kind of a bummer to me that it’s shifted in that way, to be like, now I’m just constantly analyzing. Maybe someday I’ll figure out some kind of way to turn that part of my brain off when I’m listening to music and just go back to being able to enjoy it for what it is. Some way that doesn’t involve taking huge amounts of psychedelic substances.
What was the last cool thing you stole?
I don’t know… god, so many things. The high-pitched vibrato in the middle of “upstream,” I would definitely say that’s a Lil Yachty inspiration.
Oh, like “Poland,” yeah.
Yeah. I was like, “yeah, that’s cool.” And also, I can’t be bothered doing real vibrato, so it’s two birds with one stone. What else have I stolen? A lot of the stuff that I steal is, I feel, a bit less intentional than that. It’s more subconscious, I think. I try my best to not steal specific melodies and chord progressions and stuff, but just like, general structural ideas. That’s most of what I listen to music for analytically these days: “oh, that’s a really interesting way to structure a song.” Stuff like that.
To go in the other direction, what was the last time you had that mystical, “oh my god, this is what the point of music is,” experience? Because you said you don’t have them very often.
I thought you were gonna say, “when’s the last time someone stole something from you?” (laughter). God, when was the last time I had that mystical experience in music? I’m looking through my Spotify. There’s a lot of stuff that just works on me on kind of a visceral level, where for brief moments, I stop thinking about it and I start just letting it work on me like that. Like the most recent Hannah Diamond album really worked on me. It’s a lot of dance music and stuff, where it’s just like, “oh yeah, well it’s dance music and it’s making me dance. Job done.”
Oh, the Sufjan Stevens album really was very moving. I do find that a lot of the time as I get older, I do get drawn more to—“oh, this is just very beautiful poetry.” Like the lyrics are the thing that work on me, rather than just the sound. When I was younger, I would barely even bother listening to lyrics, like they just didn’t interest me. I was just having a purely aesthetic experience, I guess, with music, but now I guess as I learn more about music, it’s like it loses a bit of its magic to me. But people can say things with language, and it’s beautiful.
What’s your writing process like? Do you write the melody first, and then the lyrics, or the reverse?
I’ve found that the most effective way for me to write songs, at least on my own, is to write lyrics first. Just because if you write a melody first, you have to sort of squish the words into that specific syllabic structure. I find that to be a little bit more tedious. That feels a bit more like doing maths or doing a puzzle. So if I write lyrics first, I have something to sing, and it already has meaning for me from the get go. I feel like that’s the most natural starting point for me.
And then I’ll be playing chords on the guitar or a piano and singing, just singing over the top to see what works, see what catches my ear as something that stands out to me as not boring or trite. Or, you know, not trite in a bad way. There’s certainly some trite stuff that I’ve let be on songs before (laughter).
I had a specific lyric I wanted to ask about. Not to make you break the spell, but I was really struck by, on “face first,” when you said, “I’ll stay alive just to kill my own story.” Could you talk about that a little bit?
Yeah. I guess that song’s me in a pretty dark place, sort of at rock bottom, and I was just feeling like—I have friends that have died, and there’s artists that I look up to that have died, and you start to just see their lives being posthumously warped or being sold in some way that is sort of sickening. On that song, I guess I was trying to find little tiny little reasons to stay alive, one of them being to not let people fuck with you after you’re dead.
Is there anything that you feel like people really misunderstand about you or your work?
Maybe it just hasn’t been enough time with the new one, but I’m not sure if people have put that much time into trying to understand it at all. I mean, there’s been other things going on, you know. People understanding my album is not the priority in the world currently, and that’s fully valid.
But yeah, I don’t know. I feel like that’s probably just a natural experience of being a musician, where it’s like, your method of communication is inherently sort of vague, so inevitably you won’t be fully understood. Like, that’s just part of the thing. I always find it nice when people try their best, but I guess if people fully understood what I was trying to say… maybe that’s not that important. Maybe it’s more important for the people to take their own meanings from it. I’m sure that in a couple of weeks I’ll get some tweet or Instagram DM that will make me think of a much better answer to this question.
Do you feel like there are more general misunderstandings, like things people assume about you that aren’t true? I like to ask this question in interviews because people usually always have something that irks them.
I’m sure I do, but I just try not to think about it. If something is bothering me, that’s usually my sign that I need to worry about other things. Especially something like that, where if it’s something to do with my ego or people not understanding who I am as a person, maybe I just need to… work harder. But I don’t know. You know? I’m not really sure. No, I have nothing. Nothing bothers me (laughter).
As far as gigs, how, how much experience do you have with doing solo performances with your own music?
Solo stuff… I guess my first proper solo gig as Katie Dey, that was like 2017. And I was doing sporadic gigs up until COVID, and in only the last, like, year and a half have I been trying to really do a lot of regular gigs around Melbourne. And I would like to do touring and stuff, but it just hasn’t seemed financially viable. I mean, before I changed my name when I was back playing in punk bands, I used to play every week, like twice a week, in bands and stuff. But yeah. It’s a work in progress.
Do you feel like the songs take different shapes and come off differently live as opposed to the headphones, sitting at home context?
Yeah, they do. And it’s making me a lot more conscious of… there’s definitely songs that work in that context and songs that don’t. I would like to be able to have the budget to have more musicians on stage with me, so that I’m not just pressing play on a backing track and doing, you know, mild vocal manipulations. I’d like for there to be more room for different interpretations and for spontaneity and stuff. That just hasn’t been possible, but there’s definitely songs, like the title track for this album I feel is really sort of a crowd pleaser. I try to get people involved, get people screaming, if they’re feeling up to it. But yeah, it’s interesting. It’s interesting to feel the reception and be more aware of what works in a live context and what doesn’t.
I know that the album title comes from Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure. Were there any other non-musical inspirations that you feel like really resonated with you in making this? Like games, anime, books.
Here’s more things that I’ve stolen as well. There’s just little bits, ripped fragments of stuff from books, from John Berger, from various poets. Things like that. Not full verses ripped wholesale, but just little references here and there. There’s some bits in one of the songs that are inspired by some of the titles on the Evergrace soundtrack—it’s an old FromSoftware game on PS2.
When you read, are you somebody who can read a bunch in one sitting, or do you get distracted easily?
I’m an atrocious reader. I have epilepsy, and part of what that involves is having some trouble reading big chunks of text. So that can be a problem for me, and I get bad headaches from reading, which is why reading poetry can be good. I guess it depends if I’m feeling well. And, you know, sometimes you’re able to get into that space where you can get immersed in a book like that, and sometimes you’re not!
Recently you won an award at the the Music Victoria Awards for disabled Australian musicians. How do you feel about that kind of designation?
Well, I had to submit for the award, so it’s fine. I don’t have any kind of problem with that. Like, I do have various disabilities. Maybe in the past I would have felt a bit more stubborn resistance to being labeled like that. I’m disabled, full stop. There’s a lot of things about my body and my life that stop me from being able to do things.
I ask because—I also have some disabilities, and I feel like people rarely talk about them in public spaces. Which makes sense, because it could make someone embarrassed, and you don’t want to have weird preconceptions, but you also have to take care of your needs and get them met.
Well, yeah, because once you start talking about it, it opens you up to that reactionary thing of like, “You’re not disabled, you just have depression!” or whatever the fuck. It’s like, I don’t just have depression, but that kind of argument where someone is very defensive about the idea of what a disabled person is in their head. And so they’re like, “Why are you getting opportunities when...” blah, blah, blah, blah. But yeah, and on the other hand, it’s like—maybe I don’t want to, and there’s discrimination that comes with being a publicly disabled person. Maybe I find that my disability may actually be troublesome for my ability to go on tour, for instance. And yet I would still like for people to offer me things in that nature just because like, there’s a chance that I could do it. There’s a chance I could be feeling okay at that time.
This is kind of a meta question. Do you like doing interviews? I feel like some people, they really like being forced to talk about themselves and some people don’t like the theater of it.
I like talking to people and I like meeting new people. I think you’re cool and I think all the people that have interviewed me have been really cool. But I do have some trouble talking about myself (laughs). That’s just part of my personality. But I don’t hate it. I would rather, like, be feeling amazing and feeling super gung-ho about talking. Like, sometimes I can just be in a talkative mood. And it’s flattering that people want to do interviews with me. It’s validating. I would never—well, sometimes I would turn it down, but I try not to turn these opportunities down. ’Cause it’s nice. It’s free press. All I’ve got to do is talk to somebody nice for a bit.
Do you feel like you’re making your music and doing your work for an audience? I know you said you kind of want people to interpret it how they are, but do you feel like you have any kind of particular audience in mind when you make your things?
Well, I guess I sort of cornered myself by titling the album never falter hero girl and gendering the title. But part of the songwriting process for me is that I need to at least briefly not be thinking about an audience, because the only way that I can be sure that a song works is if it works for me. I have to be writing from my own experience, which is the only thing that I can do. I guess just by virtue of me only having access to my own subjectivity, it’s like the songs are probably going to connect with people who are like me, because it’s at least sort of similar in some kind of way. Which probably means people who have had similar experiences to me, meaning disabled trans women, probably. And also that is just going to happen naturally by people gravitating towards certain things. I don’t know if I have a huge amount of control outside of, like, the organic reach of friends talking to friends talking to friends.
I don’t know where my music’s going to be heard. I don’t know who it’s going to be served to on Spotify. I have a horrible compulsive urge to be checking my Rate Your Music page. And it’s very funny to see the first week or two, really high ratings, like—boom! 4.0 average, some shit like that, and then as soon as other people start listening to it, it very rapidly drops. Which is totally understandable. It’s like, you’re not my audience, I don’t know what you were doing listening to the music in the first place. But it’s nice when someone who isn’t someone of my exact experience listens to it and they can still connect to it. That’s the dream, I guess.
That site is really weird about context collapse, and exposing a bunch of people to things that a small number of people push.
Yeah, it’s a silly website. I don’t know why I want validation from the Rate Your Music people so desperately. I just need my number to be big. RateYourMusic and Pitchfork. My mommy and my daddy, I guess.
Have you ever traveled outside of Australia?
No, never.
Do you notice any cultural differences between you and your friends who are in Canada, the United States, or the UK?
There’s some, I don’t know if I can think of anything specific. I think me and Devi McCallion, another one of my best friends who lives in Canada, she, like me, also grew up pretty isolated and lonely and made a lot of her friends on the internet. So I feel we have a shared culture of being online and the local, geographical, cultural differences are a little less important. And also, I feel like as an Australian, I grew up consuming a lot of overseas American media, Canadian media, stuff like that. And I think a common experience for Australian millennial/zoomer people is learning how to culturally osmosis overseas stuff. I posted a video to Twitter the other day and it happened to get some reach outside of my following and some very Australian boomer person commented, like, “What’s with her accent? She must have grown up watching a bunch of American cartoons.” And it’s just funny that that’s an obvious point of cultural or generational difference. Sorry, I got off topic again.
Off topic is the best part. Do you feel self conscious about it all, or are you like, just, “Fuck you, this is who I am?”
No, yeah. I’m not gonna try to be more Australian on purpose. I’m just gonna live my life, I think. I don’t want to be super true blue to frickin’ please some, like, dude from Perth. Anyway.
What are dudes from Perth like? I have no context for that.
Oh, forget that I said Perth. Perth is just a random… I don’t know, what’s a more country town? Wollongong? Never mind (laughter).
Do you have any big goals for the next couple years?
I would like to tour. I’d like to, at the very least, tour Australia, and if possible to tour internationally, because I do feel like most of my audience is in America. That’s just how it shook out. I think people from America would probably be surprised at how few people come to the shows in Melbourne. I don’t have a huge following here, which is fine. It’s kind of, you know, it’s comfortable. So being able to tour Australia would be nice to maybe try and grow my audience here. I’d like to get a manager, someone that can handle all this stuff. If some label wants to offer me an outlandish amount of money to make an album, that’d be great.
I don’t know. Just to figure out a way to do it so that I am not just suffering and struggling to make rent all the time would be ideal. I think I need to make some more commercially viable music. I was thinking about maybe trying to collaborate with some producers, maybe collaborate with some singers. It just sucks because, you know, you need money. You need money to make stuff. Can’t be paying somebody nothing. I have big dreams, big plans, but you never know how things are going to shake out.
Katie Dey’s never falter hero girl is available at Bandcamp. Katie Dey’s Patreon can be found here.
Thank you for reading the 116th issue of Tone Glow. Shout out Wollongong.
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