by Jack Meyer (@johnjackmeyer)
On December 31st, 2019, Priests played their last show. For its singer, Katie Alice Greer, who spent the better part of the last decade helping put the D.C. punk staple on the map, the moment couldn’t help but feel like the end of something. She moved across the country to L.A. in March, 2020, hoping to find new musicians to work with, and entered lockdown within weeks of arriving. No band to play with, no audience to play for, and the weight of so much change in so little time, she began a project that would become her first solo album, Barbarism - writing, performing, producing, and mixing an entire record herself, building something that could expose who she is creatively when no one else is looking.
The result is a wonderfully singular vision full of conviction, vulnerability, fear, fascination, and rage. The songs themselves feel like collages, layers of sound chopped up and glued together in ambiguous shapes. Industrial percussion next to over-processed vocals next to ghostly back-up tracks next to glitchy bursts of distortion - Barbarism lives up to its title in the violence of both its sound and emotion, sneering in derision to the rhythm of icy drums just as quickly as it begs for your empathy over shimmering waves of synthesizer. Shortly before its release, Greer spoke to Post-Trash, sharing a bit about what went into making the album, the highs and lows of creating independently, and the relatability of Werner Herzog, among other things.
Credit: Kathryn Vetter Miller
When did these songs start taking shape?
I live in LA now, and I used to be in DC but got here around March 1st, 2020 with four songs already recorded in a DC studio. I thought I would find new musicians out here and a studio and just keep working in that vein. Then lockdown hit, and I realized I was in a brand-new city without a job, having just spent like all my savings to move. I ended up releasing the four songs that I had on one of the first Bandcamp days just as an EP and was like, okay, I guess I’m just going to start from scratch on a totally new album. So I started writing the record that turned into Barbarism [in] April/May, 2020 and finished around probably August, 2021.
So this really started right at lockdown
Yeah, and the four from before that I thought were going to be on the record that turned into the EP are the 3 Colors EP. But yep, that’s how it came to be.
Not to harp too much on “pandemic art,” but a lot of the themes in this album seem like they’re coming from a certain place of isolation—what has this music’s relationship to the past two years been?
There were the external factors to why it sounds the way that it does. I recorded it all at home in my makeshift home studio. But also, my previous band, Priests, played our last show on New Year’s Eve, 2019. So, even regardless of the pandemic, I was just in a headspace where I was processing a lot of that—processing what felt a lot like the last chapter of my life ending, moving across the country as well. And I decided I really needed to make a record just for myself.
I love live performance. Creativity is such a conversation, it’s hard for me not to think of an audience a lot of the times when I’m writing. But because of being in lockdown, because of not really seeing people, and also just because of being in a place in my life where I was trying to really get a sense creatively of who I am when I’m working on my own, it felt like I was turned inward and trying to figure out, okay, what do I sound like when I’m writing just for me, not thinking of anybody else hearing this or how they perceived it.
It’s been kind of jarring now that we—I guess we announced the album in early April—so now that we’re in this phase where this very personal thing that I made just for myself is for other people in a way. It’s been a fun and interesting exercise of trying to explain it to other people, also to just accept, because I made it just for me, it might not be for anybody else. And that’s okay, but I do really appreciate when people have listened and not hated it.
Somebody online made a Throbbing Gristle comparison for one of the singles on this, I feel like I can hear a bit of Twin Infinitives-era Royal Trux in parts, and you mentioned in a press release wanting “Dreamt I Talk to Horses” to be your Drake song—was there any particular musical palette you were trying to draw from here?
That’s another maybe peculiar thing about this record. Or something I’m realizing more and more that perhaps a lot of people when they’re writing music are aiming for certain aesthetic markers. Maybe someone almost has a mood board of, okay, I want it to sound like this or I want it to be like that. And I think, in the back of my mind, my philosophy with music is I love music. I’m listening to all kinds of music all the time. I love dance, house music, hip hop, jazz, I grew up listening to a lot of pop country radio. I love all kinds of music. And so, in an instance like this, I don’t have really a mood board.
I just have what I’m hearing in my own head, which is probably drawing from a lot of different palates, but it’s hard for me to distill exactly what the influences were. I’m always assuming because I’m listening to so much music, I’m probably just like a sponge soaking up so many different things, and if I just turn it off and almost, with my eyes closed, start making something, then all those reference points are going to come through in some way. Kind of like putting something in the washing machine and you pull it out and all the colors are mixed together.
But I love Twin Infinitives. I also love Royal Trux’s “we’re trying to be the Rolling Stones” era - I love Accelerator. But there’s something about Twin Infinitives. I used to walk around DC with big headphones on, listening to that album on repeat when I was like twenty. I love how weird and deconstructed those songs are. So I do wonder—I haven’t listened to that album in a long time, but I wonder if I went back and put it on if I would hear a lot of what’s going on in this record.
I’m writing something for another site about this Erykah Badu album New Amerykah Part 1 (4th World War). I love that record, and I’m a huge Erykah Badu fan. I wasn’t listening to it actively while making this, but for the tracks “Flag Wave Part 1” and 2, I could tell I was writing strange songs and sort of half-remembering on this Erykah Badu record how she throws her voice in interesting ways and in the opening track is playing these different characters, pitching her voice higher or lower. It almost feels like a movie, but it’s just a little bit weird. So in my mind I’m thinking, well, if Erykah Badu did these different things, it’s okay if I do it too.
But then I went back and re-listened to that album for the first time in maybe 10 years this past weekend and realized there’s also a monologue at one point where somebody is doing a monologue from this 70s movie, Network. She’s making changes so it fits in this 2008 record context she was putting out, but listening to it I was like, “Oh my god, it’s Network,” which was a reference point for me on this record as well. The music video I did for “FITS” was kind of inspired by this movie, but it was just weird to realize. I don’t think when I got into this Erykah Badu record I knew of that movie yet, but it was crazy to realize these influences are more connected than I thought, at least subconsciously in the back of my mind. Yeah, so I don’t know if that totally answers your question, but that’s kind of how my brain works with things like this.
Just the subconscious seeping up one way or another.
Yeah, maybe the subconscious doesn’t always play into how I make stuff, but with this record in particular, I was really trying to turn off any conscious effort to guide it in a certain way, to just pull back and be like, okay well what’s going to come out if I just let it come out.
You wrote, performed, produced, and mixed this whole thing yourself. Coming from a band as collaborative as Priests, how’d it feel navigating this sort of creative freedom?
It was incredibly liberating and exciting and also so terrifying and hard sometimes. I thought about that a lot when I was working on it. I thought about all the times in band practice where I might feel so frustrated because I was writing songs with other people, and you feel the limitations of that sometimes. You just want to see your ideas for how the song should go play out fully, but you can’t because you have these collaborators, and you want to figure out how to incorporate these ideas from other people too. And yeah, making this record was just so the total opposite, where it’s like, okay, I finally am completely alone to exercise all of those impulses that I couldn’t in this band context. It was in some ways just as frustrating and just as difficult, but for totally different reasons.
I have never considered myself a great musician in a technical sense. My ego is not in playing instruments. I much prefer to write something, record a demo of an idea and find a more skilled musician to play it for me on the recording. But since that wasn’t really feasible during lockdown, I was left to my own devices. So, in that logistical, technical sense, it was frustrating. I would sit there trying and trying again to record the part as I heard it in my head, and it just took forever. There were other times when it did just feel really good and exciting because what I was writing felt so strange to me and would’ve been impossible to communicate to a co-writer or something.
But eliminating the step where you need to communicate with a collaborator— in some ways I could move much more quickly with what I was trying to do, or not have to justify the choices I was making like why does it sound like this, where’s the verse, where’s the chorus - just getting to really follow my own ideas. So yeah, it was amazing and also excruciating sometimes.
You mentioned that Dorothea Lasky’s poem “Porn” could be seen as a cypher for the album and included a spoken-word excerpt of it on “No Man.” What drew you to it?
I should really learn how to explain this because I do love the poem so much, and I did not think that Dorothea would be into me using it, but she was really generous, and it’s a recording of her on the song reading that poem.
I love the humor in that poem and also the immense sadness that the narrator is communicating - this sort of weird isolation of the speaker. I think particularly what drew me to it is the friction between personal experience and performance, or observation, or being perceived and what we’re perceiving. I think for the last couple years I’ve been fascinated by thinking of the idea of pornography less in a literal sexualized sense and more in terms of the ways that we’re all sort of—like what is pornography? It’s this very titillating thing that people view to get off or get excited. But what are the other elements of our lives that are pornographic in that sense, but maybe, not in the literal sexual sense. Is their emotional pornography in certain movies or TV shows that we watch? Is there a kind of pornographic aspect to the news, where it’s eliciting these really strong emotions and maybe is divorcing it from what makes up the substance of them?
In a personal sense, I was probably trying to process what of me feels really authentically me and what of me feels like something that has been extrapolated from me or from my life to be part of the work I’m producing. It’s one of those things where anytime I try to explain what this poem means to me, I get tripped up in my own words. I almost want it to speak for itself. But I love Dorothea Lasky, I’m a huge fan of her work and that’s probably my favorite poem of hers she’s ever written.
Sometimes with this record I feel so closely connected to it – it’s almost like how you yourself don’t know what you look like. You could look in a mirror and sort of get it but then you’ll never know how you look to other people.
Can you talk about your songwriting process on this album?
It was a little all over the place. I’ve never had one set process for writing a song, and I do think some of them were a little more straightforward. But a lot of times, people traditionally understand songwriting as a process you’ve already worked out before you get to the studio recording. Because I was writing a lot of these songs almost with my “studio” as a collaborator and recording and listening back and editing and changing things—because that was part of the process, it felt a little bit more abstract sometimes.
A lot of my favorite records, you could pick out tracks and talk about the songs, but what I love most about them is how they function as a whole, almost as one big song, with these little distinct parts. I think in some ways I was thinking about it that way. But yeah, each track was different.
There’s a great Les Blank documentary about the director Werner Herzog called The Burden of Dreams. And it’s about this movie he was making in the amazon, Fitzcarraldo, and how every step of the way making this movie, everything went completely wrong. Multiple of the main actors came down with malaria. He was really excited about Mick Jagger being cast in a supporting role, but because everyone got malaria, they couldn’t shoot on time and then Mick Jagger just couldn’t be in the movie anymore. This ship they’re dragging up a hill literally got stuck at one point. Talk about a heavy-handed metaphor for the frustrations of the creative process. But this whole movie, Les Blank is just sort of following Werner around with his camera and seeing how he deals with all these problems. In some ways this songwriting felt a bit like being in a situation like that. I am just stranded in the jungle of my mind with what for me feels like this way overly ambitious process. It didn’t originally seem overly ambitious, but now the ship is stuck and all the actors have malaria and how are we going to finish this—now that that’s going on, it just seems like such a crazy idea. So sometimes the songwriting felt like me just trying to find my way out of the proverbial jungle. Just figuring out, how do I finish the movie.
And you don’t have Klaus Kinski coming at you with a machete, so how do you know when to stop?
Actually, I told my roommate—at one point and we were talking about The Shining—and I compared writing the album to, in the last scene of the movie, where Jack Nicholson is chasing Shelly Duval and the little kid through the maze, I was like, I feel like I’m Jack Nicholson and Shelly Duval and the maze.
When you’re not working with collaborators and you’re just in your own mind, whatever parts of your personality take the form of the Klaus Kinski nemesis-friend or the self-sabotaging or really critical harsh limiting voice, these sorts of things come out when you don’t have other people to project them onto or you’re not distracted by how difficult some other person is to work with.
Like you are the person who’s difficult to work with. And yeah, sometimes, some of the creative process just felt like having to square with some of those things and figure out a way to get the critical voice to stop sabotaging what you’re working on. It’s not that I want to lack discernment with my voice, but I needed the critical voice I had to become something more supportive and constructive rather than destructive to how it felt I was working.
Why did you choose Barbarism as the title?
It felt right more than anything else. I think titles for me, it’s like I just intuitively know if it’s supposed to be the title. Barbarism felt right. Rosa Luxemburg, who was this polish leftist, writer, activist a long time ago had written this essay called “Socialism or Barbarism,” so it was a little bit of a nod to that. And I think, less in the sort of topically political sense, for me it was just, what are the sort of emotional landscapes that a word like that conveys. The kind of violence of it, the anti-civility of feelings, and how intense that can all feel within you sometimes. Those are all probably reasons why it felt like the right title.
The production on the title track really stood out to me. Can you talk a bit about what you were trying to do with that?
I love that track. Intuitively, with the lyrics and the feeling of that song, it felt like the thesis statement of the record in a lot of ways. In terms of the production, that song and “FITS” were the most frustrating for me. I hear the title track, and I am so annoyed by a lot of the production qualities on it. But even that felt aesthetically right. That it didn’t sound exactly how I wanted it to.
The original recording of it, the demo, I wanted to preserve elements of that. And I’m trying to remember what happened – god, I was making this record in such a cockamamie way. I had one gigantic Logic Pro file for a while, where it was probably two or three hours long and had these different sections of song ideas I was playing with. I think at some point my computer was like, I am going to crash and die if you keep trying to fuck with this file. So I tried to bounce a lot of that down and, in the process, lost a lot of the individual components of what I had.
I was trying to recreate the song in a different file and keep what I liked. There was so much disorganization, and I just really don’t want to do that again in my next work, but again, in this sort of emotional landscape of what I was trying to do, something about the chaos and ugliness of how the production sounded to my ears felt right. So that’s why I ended up feeling, yeah, this is the way this song is supposed to sound, a little fucked up.