INTERVIEW: Katie Wighton on her debut album 'The End': "All of these songs were a response to things ending beyond my control."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Rick Clifford
Katie Wighton first released music in 2013., but it was through the folk band All Our Exes Live In Texas that she came to national prominence. Their 2017 debut album When We Fall peaked at number 8 on the Australian ARIA album charts, and won an ARIA Award for Best Blues & Roots Album.
In 2020 Wighton reconnected with her solo career with the EP KIT, and on Friday she released her debut album The End. Produced by James Seymour, its ten tracks are gorgeously intimate and warm indiepop with Wighton’s brilliant lyrics bringing an extra, connective dimension to the songs.
“I made this record because, like everyone on the planet, I feel like I have something to say,” Wighton says. “But unlike everyone on the planet, I am privileged enough to have the means and skills and time to use music to express it. Songwriting is my medium and I am head over heels, madly in love with it. From the kernel of an idea to the final finished song, I love every second of the songwriting process.”
The album opens with the second single ‘Narcissist’, a short, sharp guitar pop track with a running time under two minutes that details regretting a relationship, and also the double standards applied to women when relationships go sour: “you'll never have to worry that they'll call you a whore.”
‘Dear John’ has a laid back beat that gradually builds throughout the song culminating in a full soundscape with horns and dramatic vocals. It speaks of being needy in a relationship and having a fear the person you love will not reciprocate that love. First single ‘Take You Home’ takes the opposite viewpoint as Wighton sings of a relationship that has grown stale and the realisation that she can no longer be bothered with it. It is as addictive and biting as ever.
‘Favour’ has a fascinating soundscape, with a chunky electric guitar and a harder, rockier sound mixing with horns and a discreet, tinkling electronic foundation. Wighton unleashes on an ex who ended their relationship. ‘Does Anyone’ is a moodier track that has elements of the new wave, post punk sound of the early 1980s, while ‘Quit Drinking’ has a poppier sound, with its insistent beat and flashes of electronic sounds, but teamed with melancholic lyrics as a relationship crumbles.
The album ends with the gorgeous ‘Unbroke My Heart’, a pared back electronic ballad with Wighton’s emotive vocal taking centerstage as she sings about finding love that repairs all the previous hurt. It is incredibly beautiful and tender and showcases Wighton’s remarkable songwriting skills.
The End is an album that creeps up on you and absolutely steals your heart. It is music that has a familiar, comfortable sound that makes you feel instantly at home, while remaining utterly unique. Wighton is arguably one of Australia’s most talented (and underrated) artists and The End is an album to treasure and a strong contender for one of the best debut albums of the year. We recently caught up with Wighton to chat more about the creation of the album.
Hi Katie, it is such a treat to chat to you again. Let's talk about The End, your debut album. You say every song is a memory and a snapshot and a series of endings, which I'm all for. This album is so complete, sonically, while at the same time being a very, very precise chapter with each song. That's a tricky thing to do, but I think you have nailed it, so congratulations.
Thank you. That's so nice.
It's really, really beautiful. Talk to me about this album, and the chapters that are within it.
I didn't realise what I was making while I was making it, and then I zoomed out at the end and I was like, ‘Oh, this is a whole bunch of stuff about things ending’ and then the implication that things are also starting again. With an ending, then comes a beginning. It was definitely a snapshot of my life at the time, and some of the songs are really old. ‘Dear John’ is five years old, ’Best Behaviour’ is probably two years old now. and ‘Unbroke My Heart’ is maybe three or four years old. All of these songs were a response to things ending beyond my control. I'm very lucky that I have music as my avenue to express myself, because it's easier to do it that way. You can be a little bit more dramatic, because you only have three minutes to say what you're trying to say. You can be a little more dramatic, which I kind of like.
You can be dramatic but you come at this with such honesty and comedy. I was going through ‘Without You’ which is such a beautiful song, and I was trying to pull quotes, but I didn't know which one was my favourite, ‘I read better stuff / I'm more than enough / I've lost my teeth / I know what I need.” There's no drama there, it's just brutal honesty.
Yeah, I mean, that is true. It's all true, nothing I have said on the album isn't true. I did floss my teeth more when my partner and I split up, and I did stop drinking so much, and he did buy a house. There were all of these things that did happen. It’s this odd thing when you break up with someone where you miss the strangest things about them, even the things that you didn't like about them, you start to miss. You become so extremely attached to someone that [you miss] even the annoying things they did. You become a better person, but you are still like ‘but I still miss you’. So I was trying to capture that feeling, and I thought the best way to do that was to give these little vignettes of what that looks like for me personally. Weirdly with songwriting, the more specific you are the more relatable it is to people. Not that I try and be relatable, I'm just trying to say what I want to say, but it does become more relatable because you are more authentic and more genuine and people can feel that.
Absolutely. We spoke about this when you were on the podcast. We all think that we're so unique, and we are, but at the same time we're all human beings, and we have very similar coping mechanisms. We're all the same monster. And when you hear that monster played out in a song, it makes us feel better, because now I know my monster. It's really beautiful. You have these really sombre moments, and then we get some late 90s grunge guitars in there as well, you've really brought it all to the table. I want to talk about ‘Best Behaviour’ because it completely floored me. Talk to me about this track, because this is something else.
My dad passed away at the start of last year, he had Parkinsons and he was sick for a really long time, we had a pretty fraught relationship. I found out that he was going into palliative care, and it was just sort of sprung on me, it was very nonchalantly sent in an email from one of my half brothers. And I just became a total wreck, I wasn't expecting to be so thrown by that, just because we weren't particularly close, and I was cross at him for a long time, I don't think he did a great job of being a dad. I knew that because he had Parkinsons, he was going to die, I just wasn't expecting to be so rocked by that news. I found myself every day waiting to see if my dad was going to die, it was this strange day to day living, from one moment to the next, wondering if he would die if I would be able to get to the funeral because it was COVID times. That's what the lyric, ‘my brothers are on their best behaviour’ is about, these two men who are just so different to me, don't deal with things in the same way that I do, and emotionally are very, very different. Just being like, ‘Wow, you guys don't have a clue but you are doing your absolute best. This is the best that you can do.’ So that's what that one is about.
You've come at it with such honesty and there's still that conviction of love there, but un-romanticised death and I think that's very rarely done.
Thank you. I'm glad that it comes across that way because there's a frank reality when someone dies that we're all a bit nervous about talking about. As soon as a parent dies, everyone goes, ‘Oh, my God, I'm so sorry, this is so sad’. And yes, it is objectively sad, but I think it's more than that. It was for me anyway, it's way more complicated than just sad. And being honest about that, I hope that gives at least one other person in the world licence to not feel guilty when it's not just sad for them, you know?
How long after this had you written the song? Was it tricky to put on the album, or were you like, ‘No, this is another ending. This is where we're at’?
I wrote it probably six months before he died, and he died the start of last year. I was really proud of the song, and I really liked the song as well. It felt like it fit amongst the others. Because some of them are so old, and some of them are quite new, my writing has changed a bit and that felt like it bridged a bit of a gap between how I'd been writing around the time the EP (KIT) came out, and how I'm writing now. I've found it hard to sing for a while. Just after my dad died, I found it hard to get the chorus lyrics out, you know, ‘I've been counting the days til your death and counting all my breaths’. I found that hard to sing, but eventually it became cathartic, and nice to get it out. It wasn't a difficult decision to put on the record.
It's so good. You said that your songwriting has changed. What are you doing differently?
I was listening to some different music and I'm a big verse, pre chorus, chorus, verse, pre chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus, you know? That's been my way my whole life. My mum is a folk singer-songwriter and I grew up with this storytelling beginning, middle and end type approach. Then I started listening to some different people like Mitski and Rosie Tucker and Kate Davis and Sharon Bennett and the way that they write is so interesting. They don't do that structure, but all the melodies and lyrics are really strong. So I thought I could do with a little bit more of that kind of interesting way of writing. That's where ‘Narcissist’ is a little different and ‘Without You’ is a little different. And the rest kind of fit into that verse chorus formula. I feel like that's where my writing is heading a little more now, which feels really nice. I can still do the classic songwriting thing, or I can be a little more adventurous which is cool.
It's so good. I feel like we're just getting many pages of you processing many different ends. Did you have fun making the album?
Oh, god, yes and no. I can't imagine things very well, so, James [Seymour] my wonderful, beautiful producer, and my partner, Jared, and my friend Jake, who was very helpful, my three J's, they were all very patient, particularly James, with how many times I was like, ‘this doesn't work, we’ve got to re-record that’, or ‘no, that's not what I'm imagining, let's do something different’. And we were working remotely sometimes, because I was in Queensland and he was in Melbourne during the 2021 pandemic. My partner played drums on the record as well, and most of the songs are about him, I sat down with him and said, ‘Ah, there's something weird going on’. And he'd be like, ‘well, it's this, and let's take this out, maybe do this’. So I had this real kind of push pull thing where I was trying to try to create what I could hear, and I couldn't always hear anything, and then I'd hear what it was and I go, ‘Well, it's not that!’ There were moments I remember being like, ‘wow, I'm making my own thing, and I get to do it my way.’ That part was really fun.
On ‘Favour’ we get snarly guitars. Talk to me about this song, were you always gonna have it so fast?
Because I was in All Our Exes Live In Texas for so long, and so much of our music was plinky plonky sad songs and quiet singing, harmonies and very beautiful, really beautiful music. I know you’re probably not allowed to say that about your own music, but I felt like we made beautiful music. And so I was like, ‘argh, I want to make something’ and I was going through a breakup, and I remember writing that song in my friend's bedroom. I came home from overseas and because my partner broke up with me while I was overseas, I had nowhere to live. I had lost my job, the band was taking a break and I could not get a job. I was a lollipop lady, one of those people with the stop sign and as a working musician, I was like ‘this is not where I want to be’. I was sitting in this bedroom and I remember thinking ‘you only had to wait a week, all we had to do is be home in Australia together, you had to wait one week and you couldn't even do that’. And I was sitting there like bashing away on my guitar and it really felt like this angry anthem and I was so sick of sad breakup songs. I was so sick of feeling sad that I was like ‘you did me a favour and you're going to realise that you made a mistake.’ I want someone who is is going through the depths of a breakup to listen to that and be like, ‘Yeah, I am better off without you!’ And then maybe listen to ‘Without You’ and feel deeply, deeply sad!
it's a roller coaster! You've now given us a song to shout in the car. What's been one of your greatest songs to shout in the car, of a similar ilk?
’If It Makes You Happy’ by Sheryl Crow. Or Alanis Morrissette ‘You Oughta Know’. That’s another good one.
Yeah, Alanis is good to shout. You got some live shows coming up, tell me all about those.
Yeah, I recently did a show in Melbourne, and it was like a club show where everyone was standing up which was really lovely. It was at a venue called Shock Kickers, and everyone there is just angelic. They're just wonderful people and it's such a great venue. I also played this gig in the Bellarine Peninsula at the Lighthouse Collective, it was a sit down gig and there were about 50 people there and it was just so stunning. It was full band, and people were still kind of bopping in their chairs, but I just realised how much I love a sit down audience. Maybe it's because they're captive, maybe that's why, but I think that there's something really beautiful about that. I tried really hard to create that on this run of shows. So the one in Melbourne is at Long Play, and there's only 30 seats. If we sell out that first night, there is a potential second show, but I would probably get in quick sticks if you're in Melbourne. And then Sydney is at The Great Club, which again is a sit down show and I'm having a comedian [as the support act]. And then same in Brisbane, it's at Black Bear, it’s not sit down but there'll be a comedian [as support], because All Our Exes Live In Texas did that a few years ago and it was just a hoot. So I wanted to make it something that I would like to go to, and that my mum would like to go to. The really late nights and standing up for hours, I'm just not up for it anymore, and so I wanted to give people the option of a nice seat and a little show!
The End is out now via ABC Music. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Katie Wighton, you can follow her on Instagram and Facebook.
