folk

When Katie Gavin announced that she would be releasing a solo project, she expected the backlash to be worse. Seated in the living room of her grandmother’s house on a September afternoon, the 31-year-old singer chuckles nervously as she looks back at the announcement. “I thought they might get mad at me,” she says of her fans.
As one-third of the self-described “greatest band in the world” MUNA, it makes sense that Gavin would be nervous. Over the course of the last decade, she and her friends Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin have built the kind of impassioned fan base that most indie acts only dream of. Between sold out shows at iconic venues like Los Angeles’ Greek Theater and headlining slots at beloved alt-rock festival All Things Go, MUNA has grown to fit the legend its members created around it — meaning any perceived threat to its existence could be met with vocal opposition.

With the benefit of hindsight, Gavin says that fear is a nice problem to have. “It’s a good thing, ultimately, to have a project where people are invested in what you’re going to create next,” she says.

Trending on Billboard

That anger from her fans never quite materialized — in fact, they overwhelmingly expressed enthusiasm for What a Relief, Gavin’s debut solo LP due out Friday (Oct. 25) via Saddest Factory. Described by Gavin as “Lilith Fair-core,” the album is interested less the genres of its songs, and more in their emotional lyrics — tracks charting the cyclical concept of motherhood (“The Baton”), emotionally inauthentic romance (“Sanitized”) and the grief of losing a pet (“Sweet Abby Girl”) all bear Gavin’s stamp of remarkably poetic-yet-lucid songwriting.

As MUNA’s in-house lyricist, Gavin found herself in 2019 with a backlog of what she refers to as “MUNA castoffs” — songs she wrote and presented to her bandmates, but that ultimately didn’t fit within the trio’s creative vision for themselves. “There is a tonal difference that speaks to the scale of things — MUNA has become so ambitious, so the songs have to be scalable to a certain size,” she explains. “A lot of these songs feel like they live in a much smaller world.”

But when she shared a selection of those songs with her friends Eric Radloff (known on-stage as Okudaxij) and Scott Heiner (MUNA’s original drummer), they both told her how much they loved them. “They were the first fans of this solo project,” she says. “I wasn’t really thinking about doing anything with them until that started happening, where I started to realize, ‘Oh, there’s enough of these songs that it’s become something else.’”

Radloff invited Gavin to play a “secret set” at a February 2020 show of his, allowing her the space to learn “what it would feel like to play these songs as just me,” she recalls. By the time she was done, she knew that she had something special. When COVID-19 shut the world down the following month, Gavin got to work with Radloff and Heiner arranging the songs for a potential solo release.

The spirit of sharing songs she wrote with her friends suffuses the finished product of What a Relief, making the case for Gavin as one of the most talented songwriters working today. It’s a strong case to be made — outside of writing all of MUNA’s songs, Gavin has garnered a number of co-writes with artists like Maren Morris and The Japanese House, which she says has only contributed to a “shift in my confidence” that allowed her solo LP to exist.

“One of the things that’s interesting about co-writing is, if I’m in a room with someone else, I naturally attune more to what they want. I can lose my own sense of what I want,” she says. “I have had to both develop that and try to practice that, while also simultaneously accept who I am and be honest about it when I’m working so that I can navigate and find a way that works for me. It’s kind of about self-advocacy.”

Part of that practice means knowing when she is not the best fit for a job — when it came to fine tuning the sound of her album, Gavin says that she offered her input, but gave producer Tony Berg and his team of engineers and mixers like Will Maclellan the space they needed to make What a Relief soar. “I wish that this wasn’t true, but my instinct was to say that I am a pillow princess in the studio — I don’t care what microphone we use, I just want to be able to tell you if I like it!” she exclaims. “I think part of getting older and developing as a creative is understanding delegation, and not trying to be in control of something if that’s not your passion.”

While the project spans a wide variety of genres, Gavin acknowledges that much of the record settles somewhere within the range of folk music, in the vein of her heroes like Joni Mitchell, the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman. Violins, mandolins and guitars pepper the album’s various backdrops, as Gavin sings directly to the human condition of looking to change. As she says: “I’m gonna fiddle.”

One of the album’s most beloved singles, “Inconsolable,” even dips into bluegrass, featuring the vocals of Sean and Sara Watkins of string-band Nickel Creek. But Gavin reveals that, had it not been for her friend and label boss Phoebe Bridgers, the song may not have existed in its current form.

“We had kind of done this, like, Ben Folds, Regina Spektor-esque piano version of it, and it just wasn’t hitting the same way. We only had a few days left in the studio, and Phoebe was like, ‘I liked it when it was bluegrass,’” she says. Once they had the Sean and Sara in the room, the song finally clicked. “We ended up recording the song in about 10 minutes, I think we did a total of two takes.”

The song doesn’t come as a complete shift for fans of MUNA — on 2022’s affirming anthem “Kind of Girl,” the pop trio leaned into the stylings of country ballads to better convey the emotional heart of the song. But Gavin explains that there is a potent lyrical difference between a song like “Kind of Girl” and one like “Inconsolable.” “It sounds weird — I think there is this difference between singing ‘work in the garden’ (on ‘Kind of Girl’) and singing ‘baby lizards’ (on ‘Inconsolable’),” she quips.

Early in the process of creating her album, Gavin went to McPherson and Maskin, telling them that she wanted to release the LP as a solo project. Despite some jokes shared on an episode of their podcast Gayotic (“What was the reason you wanted to do this without Naomi and I?” Maskin pointedly asked), both of Gavin’s bandmates supported the idea, with Maskin even playing a series of backing instruments on the final version of the album.

“I’m so grateful that they’ve been super, super supportive,” Gavin beams. “The only thing that they’ve ever expressed concern about is my own workaholism, because this just means that I took on a second job — they would both check in, like, ‘Cool, are you okay?’”

The individual band members’ work ethic, though, is what has helped MUNA become a cult favorite in pop spaces. With the trio’s oft-cited status as the leading “queer heroes” of pop music, Gavin has noticed the outsized rise of queer artists over the last year, with pop stars like Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp and others breaking through to mainstream audiences in a way that once felt impossible.

“It makes me really emotional, I see these young people that are coming up as actual superheroes,” Gavin says. The singer is hesitant to take too much credit for the current state of queerness in pop music (“There’s a loud voice in my head saying, ‘This would have happened regardless, b—h,’” she laughs). But she eventually admits that she is watching, in real time, as she and her two best friends at least help in making lasting change.

“If you keep your head down and work and believe that what you’re doing with your friends is cool, you can eventually, in ten years, shift f–king culture,” she says. “It’s wild how far your impact can go if you’re consistently trying to ground [yourself] in the world that you want to be in.”

But there are aspects of the current ascent of LGBTQ+ artists that Gavin is wary about — especially when it comes to how non-straight and non-cisgender identities are already being viewed as trends for the music industry to capitalize on.

“That’s how the current stage of capitalism that we are in functions,” she says with a sigh. “Every time the structure realizes that it can profit off of a new identity, there is a choice presented to people of that identity — do I want to assimilate and take on those privileges?”

Gavin validates many artists’ choice to accept those benefits — after all, “everyone’s in such desperate financial situations that it makes sense.” But she makes it clear, when it comes to both MUNA and her solo career, that she’s more interested in building a sustainable future for herself and artists like her.

“There are so many people that I see as siblings in my community who are not safe in this moment, and I want to be with them. I don’t want to be with the straights,” she says. “So we’re going to continue pushing the envelope and making it clear that we’re not happy to be ‘part of the club.’”

There’s a question Joy Oladokun often finds herself asking when thinking about her career: “If Nina Simone had the internet, what would she do with that?” she ponders. “Like, what sort of Mavis Staples-meets-Azealia Banks tweets would we have gotten from her?” 
The High Priestess of Soul is far from the only artist the folk–pop artists finds herself ruminating on: throughout her conversation with Billboard, Oladokun drops names ranging from Big Mama Thornton to Paul McCartney to Big Freedia. But the artists she often finds herself thinking about, she says, are the ones whose names she doesn’t know.

“I think a lot of my music comes from a place of knowing that not all Black queer people got to live this long or get this far,” she explains. “It feels like I’m fighting with both the idea of progress, the reality of progress and the cost of it.”

Trending on Billboard

A career’s worth of those feelings come roaring out on Oladokun’s stunning new album Observations From a Crowded Room (out today via Amigo Records). Written and produced by Oladokun in the 15 months since her 2023 LP Proof of Life, the new record sees the singer-songwriter wrestling with her current place in the music industry and the world at large. Employing electronic flourishes to accentuate her pointed songwriting, Oladokun examines why it seems that social advancement in the music industry is always two steps forward, one step back.

The idea for the record started after a whirlwind of touring in 2023 — after running through the summer festival circuit and performing as an opening act for John Mayer and Noah Kahan’s tours, Oladokun found herself at the end of a grueling schedule, sitting by a river with her guitar somewhere in Oregon.

“I was on mushrooms,” she giggles. “I was having an emotionally hard time, then. And when the shrooms hit, I saw this moose — and right there, I just wrote the first song on the album.”

That song, “Letter From a Blackbird,” provides the central argument for the album within its first minute. “These days I sure regret how much of me that I have given/ I feel my patience running out, I hear the water sing to me,” she sings, accompanied only by a vocoder chorus of her own vocals. “Blackbird: what did you think you’d run into out here in the wild?”

Throughout the record, Oladokun contends with managing the expectations of her community (the hip hop-infused”Hollywood”), examining the history of marginalized artists (the pop-leaning “Strong Ones”) and her own desire for recognition from the industry (the fiery folk ballad “Flowers”). Punctuating those songs are brief “observations,” interludes scattered around the project that see Joy speaking directly to her audience and telling them, point blank, how she’s feeling.

While she’s become known in industry circles for her tell-all lyricism, Oladokun acknowledges that Observations is something entirely different that her past albums. “In a sort of unhinged way, Proof of Life was a democracy, and this was more of a dictatorship,” she says. “When you’re working with [other songwriters], sometimes you have to sacrifice a feeling or pull a punch just to get something through. The benefit of making this alone was just that, for 40 minutes, I could just be unfiltered. I’ll give you the choruses and hooks you can hold on to, but I also want to be as honest as possible.”

While Oladokun serves as the sole songwriter and producer on the vast majority of the album’s records, a few other songwriters appear in the liner notes — including Maren Morris (“No Country”), Brian Brown (“Hollywood”), Edwin Bocage and Theresa Terry (“Strong Ones”). As she puts it, Observations wouldn’t have been possible had she not made early connections with songwriters throughout her growing career.

“This album is the fruit of so many lessons learned, and people like Dan Wilson and Ian Fitchuk or Mike Elizando, or even like contemporary great songwriters like INK,” she says. “These were people who took time to really pour into me, and said, ‘Here’s what’s great about what you do, and here’s how we can elevate it.’”

The songs where Oladokun gets the most raw see the singer calling out Nashville, and the industry system therein that she says failed her. “Letter” opens with the thought that, if she drowned in a river, the city wouldn’t cry for her, but rather “breathe sighs of relief.” Penultimate track “I’d Miss the Birds” sees Oladokun calling out the town by name, decrying its willful ignorance of her and people like her, while “Proud Boys and their women” continue to thrive.

In the year since she wrote those songs, Oladokun’s feelings on Nashville have only calcified. “Put it in ink, Nashville should be ashamed of itself. I’ll say it as long as they don’t gun me down; this town is so full of s–t,” she says, staring directly into her Zoom camera. “It’s not even because Nazis can walk around freely — that’s a problem, but Nazis are gathering all over the states. My genuine issue is the people who only want to do enough to appear good, but will never lift a finger to actually help.”

In the eight years she’s spent living in the country music capital of the world, Oladokun says she’s watched firsthand as artists and executives praise the “progress” that the city has made socially while Black queer artists like her continue to be ignored. “I am the Ghost of Christmas f–king Past for this city. I am where I am at in my career in spite of this city. In spite the utter lack of support,” she says. “For all the f–king country girls in glitter shorts dancing around with drag queens, how many of them have offered me features or responded to even one of my f–king DMs?”

As she goes on, Oladokun catches herself and clarifies her point. “I want to separate the part of it that can seem personal, the part where it’s just, ‘Oh, people aren’t paying attention or being fair to me,’” she explains, addressing Nashville directly. “I’m not the only Black and gay talent in your city. I am one of a huge, growing faction of artists in your backyard who you don’t support, because you know what it will cost you.”

Her desire to take a breath and zoom out also happens during Observations. On the stirring soul anthem “No Country,” Oladokun looks to the various genocides occurring throughout the world — in an Instagram post, the singer named Palestine, Congo, Sudan and Nigeria as direct inspirations — and yearns for a moral imperative to protect people from harm our increasingly fractured world.

On an album that deals so much with her own personal struggles, Oladokun felt it was important to put her grievances into a larger context. “My job just isn’t that important. Like, my job is hard — but everyone’s job is hard,” she says. “It’s important for me to remember, because I as a human being never want to let this job stop me from being the best version of myself. I can’t let my tunnel vision of what my day-to-day is like distract from what I think the purpose of sharing my music is, which is to give people something to listen to in a weird world.”

That’s also, in part, why Oladokun never tries to offer big-picture answers to the problems she presents on Observations. Not only does she not have all the answers, but she points out that we all have to agree on what the problems are before we can talk about solutions. “It’s so important to name things, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society comes from our refusal to name things,” she says. “The goal of this record was never to give an answer, but to say, ‘Ow. This hurts.’”

When Oladokun began writing Observations From a Crowded Room, she was considering quitting the music business altogether. When asked where she’s at with that internal conversation today, she shrugs. “My relationship with my job right now … there’s sort of an agnostic quality to it,” she explains. “I believe my career has a future, but it’s so rarely demonstrated in front of me of what it’s like for someone like me to do so. This is the beginning of a conversation — it’s me saying, ‘This is what it’s been like.’ And it’s a little bit up to other people to say, ‘That is what it’s like.’ I can’t be the only one trying to change the culture.”

A wry smile appears on her face: “Ask me again in a year.”