Katie Gregson-MacLeod is a Scottish singer-songwriter who was born in the small city of Inverness. Her mother, a pianist, taught the school choir, while her father was an English teacher, instilling in her an appreciation for music and literature from an early age. While studying history at Edinburgh University, she released her debut EP, Games I Play. It was between that indie pop-leaning project and 2023’s Songs Written for Piano EP that the viral success of ‘complex (demo)’ led to a deal with Columbia Records. Having moved to London, she put out another EP, Big Red, on Sony in 2023 before splitting with the label and signing with Matt Maltese’s Last Recordings on Earth. Her next EP, last year’s Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early, was a stepping stone for her just-released debut album, Albatross, which takes its name from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, where the phrase “an albatross around your neck” originates. Tracked live over two weeks in Frome with producer Dom Monks and co-producer Will Taylor, it’s not just an album about being disillusioned by the major label industry but embracing all her best songwriting instincts: disarming intimacy, playfulness, a keen eye for power dynamics at every level. As she realizes on the heart-wrenching closer ‘Daughter’, “I can do whatever I want to.”
We caught up with Katie Gregson-MacLeod for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about the beginnings of her songwriting journey, recording Albatross, writing on piano, and more.
I saw you quote the Lucy Dacus lyric, “In five years, I hope the songs feel like covers,” in a broader context, but I wonder if it rings true for you in a kind of literal way when you think back on the beginnings of your songwriting journey.
It’s a great lyric for many reasons, on many levels, but literally, it does feel like that sometimes. I’m sometimes struck by the resonance of a random older song. I think sometimes I’ll be playing it live, and I’ll really feel a song that I wrote when I was 18, 19, or 20, and I’ll be really surprised by that. Obviously, like all songwriting, even if it’s your own, what it means to you and how it can be applied to your life changes all the time. In general, I can sometimes feel a bit of distance or separation between me and some of the older stuff. I think songs like ‘Complex’ feel quite distant emotionally sometimes, because I didn’t have a very long emotional life with them before they were belonging to other people.
Often, the times that I feel songs being most precious to me are the times between writing and making it, when no one else has really heard it, but I like to play it now and again in my house, or maybe I’ve shown a couple of my friends, and it feels very much mine. Whereas some songs, like ‘Complex’, didn’t have that long life of that emotional period. Sometimes I can find that at gigs, for different reasons, I get that emotional connection to it – whether that’s seeing people singing along, them being emotional, or having it come on a day where you feel a certain way that relates to the song. It’s interesting, the life that songs live within you. I’m so excited to feel that out with the album and what songs are going to be important to me emotionally in five years.
There’s already some distance between finishing these new songs and putting them out, but it must be hard to imagine them feeling, in five years, the same way you feel now towards Games I Play.
I think a big part of making this record in the way that I made it – which was very live, over a short time period, with players in a room captured in a very condensed vacuum – comes down to Dom Monks, the producer. This is his ethos as well: capturing exactly where I am at that exact point, and having it only need to reflect me then, in those two weeks. I was a little bit nervous and insecure going into recording, and Dom said to me, “The best album that we can make is the one that reflects you right now the best.” Because I was thinking, “What if I’m not good enough at this?” As it went on, I realized that’s the whole point – the perceived imperfections, or the shortfalls, that’s exactly as it was when it was recorded, and therefore it’s what it is.
I feel like that gives me a timeless relationship to the album. I didn’t even sing that song the same way ever again. The way that it was recorded was one of the takes, and that take has never been repeated. I never sing the same way twice; I never play the exact same thing twice. It was captured in the moment, and therefore, it’s so of a time that it’s kind of timeless for me in my life. Now, looking back, I listen to some of the recordings and I’m like, “Wow, I make mistakes this whole time,” but it’s part of the charm for me.
I’m interested in that in the making of the album as a continuation of how you recorded the Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early EP that came out last year, in the sense that it was also live, off the cuff, and spontaneous. In collaboration with Dom Monks and Will Taylor, did you maintain that same approach for the most part?
I think the EP felt like a stepping stone to the more extreme version of it, which is the album. With the EP, I just wanted to make music again. It’d been a while since I’d recorded or collaborated with players, and I really wanted to have that experience. It’s kind of rare for me in my life to just be in a room playing with other people and recording it. I really found that EP experience magical. There was a bit more overdubbing than there was on the album, and we did a little bit of work back in the studio in London, but for the most part, it was four days in the North Highlands. It was captured, and it made me realize how much I needed to do that for the record as well.
I think I can kind of credit Will with that in a sense, because I spoke to him in such depth about his experience of making his last record, which was the self-titled Flyte album he’d just put out around that time. That’s how I came to work with Dom as well, chatting to Will about wanting to go away and come back feeling like it has that kind of organic approach. I kind of hate the word organic, but it is, unfortunately.The way that Dom works always fascinated me, and obviously his output is amazing, the records always sound amazing, and if it’s good enough for Adrianne Lenker, it’s good enough for me. [laughs] It landed in a style of recording where, essentially, we had barely any pre-production, no rehearsals. We recorded vocals and instruments all together. That was such an amazing experience – terrifying as a singer-songwriter, but also so special and exactly what the record needed.
There are also distinct contrasts between some of the songs – how you approach something like ‘How Were You to Know’, which is one of the most stripped-back and raw tracks on the album, and then ‘Roadkill’, which has some lovely embellishments.
I think a lot of the time, luckily, those questions answer themselves, and you feel what a song needs either when you write it, or when you talk about it and play it. Some songs take more thinking about. I think ‘Roadkill’ and a song called ‘Second Hand’, which is the second one on the B-side, were the hardest to get right, because the rest of them just kind of happened naturally. A song called ‘Same Eyes’ on the B-side as well, that one also was weirdly a question mark for a while about what it needed. There is a real preservation of songs’ natural form, I suppose, when it comes to Dom and his style of recording, because it is recorded the way it is. That initial performance of vocal and guitar, or vocal and piano, is such a core of the piece. We weren’t building things for me to then lay a vocal on top. It was a real kind of trusting everyone’s instincts situation. With ‘Roadkill’, we were like, “What’s going to unlock it?” I think the different guitar parts that we landed on did that, but that was later on in the process – that took a while.
The opening track, ‘196’, with the image you evoke of playing music with people, is an interesting starting point for the record. You’re going back to a specific time in your life where music had a certain kind of preciousness. How intentional was that placement?
It’s one of those things that, retrospectively, when I look at it, makes so much sense to me. Obviously, it’s a song reminiscing about a time when I felt really connected to music, really connected to a place and a time, and felt like I understood so much more, or that things were simpler – and at the time of writing it, feeling like I’d lost touch with that a bit. It’s funny, because I wasn’t going to put that song on the record at all. I loved it, and when I wrote it, I was proud of it, but it was actually in a kind of discard pile that I’d sent Dom of songs that were not really necessarily my top 10. He instantly was like, “Well, that should go on the record, come on.” And I was like, “Oh, interesting that you think that.” It speaks to his instant understanding of the record – we didn’t have a sit-down discussion, me and Dom, about exactly what this record means and what every song means to me, but at every turn, I realized more and more how much he understood what the album was all about.
This, I guess, was my first sign. Putting ‘196’ – especially putting it first, which was his idea – makes so much sense, because this album was, for me, a return to that feeling of collaborating in a room with people. It makes so much sense that for a record about wanting something to unlock your contentment or your peace, or wanting something back. Everybody looks to the past to give them their answers, or looks to the past and imagines that they had it so much better, or that they understood so much more. Putting that song first, I wasn’t sure about it for a while, and now I’m like, “Oh, well, of course.” That just speaks to the people I was working with being so in tune.
On ‘The Big Lie’, you also reference the Market Bar in Inverness, where I read that you still play at open mics. I’d love for you to talk about your history with that pub, and what the community there means to you now.
So, the pub I used to play in was the Captain’s Bar. That’s the one I used to play in a lot, and I will still go back. Whenever I’m in Edinburgh, I go back and I play a song or two there. The community – some of the people I knew back then are still there; they’re still playing there every day, most days. Some people that I played with aren’t there anymore. But I still feel this kind of return home in a way, even if no one in that room knows that’s my experience, or maybe they don’t know who I am, or they never met me. I definitely sit there and I have that moment to myself of reflection.
The Market Bar – I go there on a night out in Inverness. I was there a few days ago, actually. [laughs] It’s this amazing, slightly grungy, quirky music pub. It’s got an old man pub downstairs, and then an upstairs where the live music happens. Great place. That is referenced in ‘The Big Lie’, because on the walls they hang photos of essentially dead iconic musicians. So that’s why I used that in that song. It was a big thing for me as well since I’ve moved to London and been full-time in the music industry – I was always coming back and returning to Captain’s Bar and the Royal Oak and these places where I felt such a connection to music, kind of like ‘196’ talks about. Those are the places where I felt the most in tune and connected to music, so I guess it was my way of feeling it again, even when I wasn’t in some chapters of my life.
When you were writing these songs in this chapter of your life, did they mean something different to you than when you were in London going back and forth more?
I think when I wrote ‘The Big Lie’ and ‘196’, they weren’t far off each other – maybe half a year or something. I was definitely in a time when my connection to music and what it meant to be someone making and releasing music, my relation to that career, was definitely pulled into question. I was struggling – I felt like, as much as I’d been so lucky to fall into the career that I have now, I also felt like I’d made some sacrifices. Maybe in the process of getting to have these amazing opportunities, my connection to the core artistic form had changed. I don’t know if that’s true – I wrote this album, I wrote so much music in that time period – but it was how I felt about what was happening around me and my career progression. As you say, returning home to these places or thinking about them felt more weighted in this time period. They felt symbolic, in a way, because they were places where I understood myself and my music more than I understood it at that time.
In terms of the campaign, you introduced the record with ‘Nothing Really Changes’, which is this bird’s-eye view of your journey in a neat, emotional way. But listening to the record, ‘The Big Lie’ is an interesting follow-up, because it digs into a lot of things around the major label business while being unsparing in the details. Do you remember feeling a different sort of apprehensiveness with it?
When I wrote ‘The Big Lie’, it was about a year and a half before I made the album, and it was at a time when I just felt very disillusioned. All these questions around my own career and my own ambition were swirling around my head. Since I’ve started writing music, I’ve really not been good at considering who might hear or receive these things I’m writing. [laughs] I’ve been a very selfish songwriter – I’ve just always written songs and said things in the way that I wanted to say them at the time I wrote them. Although sometimes I can become more nervous about things a long time after writing them, it’s why it’s such an emotionally important process for me, and it’s why my style is the way it is, I suppose.
There was no apprehension in writing ‘The Big Lie’, but I definitely felt some catharsis in it. ‘Nothing Really Changes’ is, as you say, this very retrospective, zoomed-out version of my life. It was really cathartic to write, and it felt like a real acceptance and reflection of the last four or five years. Those two had distinct roles in my life. ‘The Big Lie’, it’s not even specifically about people I know or companies I’ve been involved with, it’s really broad. Especially with the chorus, when I say, “Tell me the last time you and I were on the same side,” that is, for me, about so much more than the music industry. That is how I feel about lots of things to do with capitalism and politics.
I’m also thinking of it in the context of Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early, in the sense of, maybe some weightier subjects were withheld because you were thinking about a debut record at the time, but that wasn’t what materialized first. Was there a palpable shift in your mindset when you actively went into making Albatross?
Yeah, I think as I’ve been writing since the beginning of my adult writing journey, I’ve always held songs back, thinking, “That’s the album.” So I’ve never really had a moment of, “Okay, now I’m gonna start writing for the album.” I always had my sights set on the debut. And even though the shape changed so much, I knew the kind of themes and weight that I wanted the songs and the album to take. Even six or seven years ago – and none of those songs are on the record now – I remember I would make track lists and think about the debut as a separate thing from the EPs, which were little timestamps. I quite liked doing the EPs in that way, where they’d be set in a specific time or set in one story. I liked doing it that way because I felt it was a separate thing in my mind from the album.
For instance, the oldest song on the record is now ‘Same Eyes’, which was 2023. I wrote all of Big Red and Love Me Too Well after that song, or around the same time. It wasn’t as much that I suddenly changed gear – I knew that the songs that meant the most to me and had the most weight were for the album. That’s probably why you have that variation of tone, sonic identity, and themes on the record. I feel the through lines and the threads, but I’m also bringing a lot of different chapters of my life into it. You can tell there are different versions of me or different perspectives, but I still feel it as one voice. I’ve kind of been forever writing this one.
‘Chicago’ stands out because it’s one song where you’re writing from a perspective other than your own. What was that a lyrical experiment like?
It’s so much fun. It’s something that I don’t do enough, and I really want to do more of it, because there is a sense of freedom and play that you can get. I think you can hear that in the verses of that song. The whole song is quite a funny song to me – the chorus itself is kind of hilarious, the verses are quite wordy and playful, and I think that’s the kind of element that can come out when you’re writing separate from yourself. When it’s in your personal life, if you have a feeling, you really want to say it in the exact right way. I think I’ll always be a heavily autobiographical writer, just because of the role that songwriting plays in my emotional processing and my life. It’s a journal, essentially, so that’s always going to be really important to me. But as I evolve as a writer, and as time goes on, it would be a shame not to have the challenge and the play of writing from other people’s stories as well.
Given the role they play in your emotional processing, were there songs about a specific subject you knew you wanted to write before they were actually written?
For sure, yeah. I think ‘Same Eyes’ is probably my best example of that – it’s a song about my mom. I’ve always been terrible at writing about family. I want to be able to mythologize and encapsulate my amazing family, but sometimes when something feels so vast and far-reaching in your life, it’s hard to put it into words. When I eventually wrote ‘Same Eyes’, I was so happy to have expressed it in that way, and it just kind of poured out. It was in a writing session with three other writers, actually. We started chatting about it all and what I wanted to write about. Everyone was getting quite emotional, because everyone was talking about their mothers, and it was all quite lovely – and then I just couldn’t get anything out. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to say. They said, “Okay, we’re gonna go for a coffee. We’ll be back in half an hour.” They came back, and I’d written all the lyrics. I’d written what became the song; what we ironed out after that was some chord shifts and stuff like that.
Having those conversations really helped me beforehand, and then they gave me that room – I think they just knew it was gonna come out, so they left me to it. It was years of wanting to write a song like that, and then 20 minutes of writing, which is sometimes how it happens. When that was written, I thought, “That needs to be an album song,” because it had such a weight to it due to the subject. I guess I have lyrical ideas or song ideas that I know, even if it doesn’t happen on that day, one day I’m gonna write a song based around them, and it’ll be so cathartic when it happens. I really felt that with ‘How Were You to Know’ – it’s a very lyrically dense song, but it expressed a lot of what I wanted to say about the subject. I would say ‘Daughter’ as well hit upon some things and said them in a way that I had probably been vying to say for a long time.
How did that one happen in comparison to ‘Same Eyes’?
‘Daughter’ was also in a writing session, though it was less of a traditional session style – I went for a cup of tea at my friend Elanor Moss’s house. Do you know Elanor?
Oh, yeah. I’ve interviewed her.
So I went to Ellie’s, and we always have great big deep chats. At that time, we spoke a lot about where I was in my head and in my career; I was in a bit of a turning point, a period of questioning. It was relatively quick as well. We spoke about records that we love – we’re both fans of very classic songwriting and lovers of folk music of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. Our favorites are always going to be very classic writers, and we’re both big fans of Sibylle Baier, Molly Drake, and Bridget St. John. We had probably listened to or thought about those artists a lot on that day, and then we started writing and found this melody that felt quite classic. She’s incredibly clever and lyrically inspired, and it was really fun to write lyrics with her. Usually, with lyrics, I’m like, “That’s my business,” but Ellie has such great literary references, and she understood where I was coming from so much because we’d had such great chats about it.
We had this really beautiful afternoon of writing, and we found that refrain, “I can do whatever I want to.” Which is the album – that line itself the whole thing, I suppose. And the sadness of that line – we loved the way it felt when we came up with, “Sometimes the things you want, you get/ I can do whatever I want to.” Those moments where you say something so plainly, yet in the context of the song and in the context of your own life, they hold such a weight. That’s what that song was – it was just very simply put, but it said things in a way that I hadn’t really said them before, and that’s kind of why it’s the last song on the record as well. I don’t think I expected that to come out of that day. It was just a very beautiful moment.
I’ve been listening to a lot of folk records in the vein of Sibylle Baier and Bridget St. John, and something I’ve realized is whenever I hear a piano ballad on a folk record that’s mostly acoustic guitar, my attention is immediately piqued. That’s what I felt listening to the two piano songs on the record, ‘Daughter’ being one of them. Do you find yourself entering a different headspace when presenting a song in that way?
Piano was my first companion in songwriting. I’m not a great pianist – I don’t really know what I’m doing on the piano, never learned, and would love to learn more to help me out. I sometimes find myself getting frustrated with instruments, where I go, “I know that I have a really good idea, but I just don’t really know what’s going on.” Sometimes with the piano, like with those two songs – especially with ‘Kissing’, because it was such a personal, isolated experience – it just hits on an emotion and is the perfect companion for an emotion in a way that I’ve never experienced with other things. Being my first instrument and the thing that I wrote on when I was growing up, I do just have this special relationship with it. The satisfaction of nailing a piano song that’s perfect, that says what I want to say perfectly – that is an amazing feeling. Emotionally, the place that I can switch into when I hit that groove with it is really exciting, and those are some of the most fulfilling moments of my songwriting life.
Like, ‘I Don’t Think of Kissing You’ – when that idea formed, and then I just worked away at it for a couple of evenings at my parents’ house, it was like a puzzle to put together because I wanted it to feel like my favorite classic jazz standards. I liked the idea that they often have a mixture of a harmonic and a lyrical return – maybe they’ll go elsewhere for a bit melodically, but they’ll always return to this central line or harmonic movement. It was really hard to write, in a way, because I knew I wanted to have these satisfying turns and then go, “I don’t think of kissing you.” When I found that song, worked on it, and achieved what I wanted to achieve, it was the most euphoric experience, in a way that’s specifically my experience on piano. I still sometimes have periods of time where I’m really drawn to it, and other times when I’m more drawn to the guitar.
I’m kind of with you there, where I love classic guitar folk, but sometimes when you hear that piano, you just can’t help it. I was listening to Molly Drake, ‘I Remember’ – that’s a piano song, isn’t it? That one I just think is perfect. And also, this is kind of random, but ‘And So It Goes’ by Billy Joel. I would call that a perfect piano song as well. When I hear perfect piano songs, I do just think you just can’t come close – there’s something so pure.
Did you know you were going to title the record Albatross when you wrote that line in ‘Daughter’?
I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know for ages. I felt like it was maybe more literary than I usually go, and I was like, “Does it sound like I’m trying to be too clever, or trying to allude to something that feels quite separate?” The more time that went on, the more I realized that that line in that poem and the symbolism really just make sense and represent the record so well. I’m going to credit Elanor Moss with that as well – she told me about the poem and referenced it as we wrote ‘Daughter’. We sat having dinner in Frome in the middle of the album recording process, and I was going over some ideas for album titles, and she said, “Well, there’s Albatross.” I didn’t know for ages, but I just kept coming back to it, realizing that it was the strongest representation of what I wanted to say. The album encompasses different chapters and themes in my life, and they all feed into that albatross symbolism.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Katie Gregson-MacLeod’s Albatross is out now via Last Recordings on Earth.
