Who Is Katie Gavin Without Muna?

Not long after Katie Gavin released “Aftertaste” this summer, a murmur of unease rippled through the Muna fandom. For nearly a decade, Gavin, 31, has been known primarily as a member of the band, alongside Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin. The song seemed, to some, like it could be a harbinger of a breakup. “Have you guys seen the comments of people that are, like, really scared about Muna?” Gavin said on their podcast, “Gayotic,” in July. “Don’t worry, guys. We’re still a band,” McPherson said. “We’re still coming for your ass,” Gavin added.

“Aftertaste” was the first single from Gavin’s new album, What a Relief, out Oct. 25—her debut as a solo artist. The record traces roughly the same period as the three records that make up Muna’s discography, as well as virtually the entirety of Gavin’s twenties. When she wrote “Casual Drug Use” in 2016, she intended for it to appear on Muna’s debut, About U; in an alternate timeline, “Sketches” ended up on Saves the World; and she wrote “Aftertaste” on the same day as “Silk Chiffon,” the effervescent, sapphic, Phoebe Bridgers-featuring hit from Muna.

From one angle, the boundary between Gavin solo and Gavin as one-third of Muna appears blurry. But for What a Relief, Gavin has turned up the dials on her folk-country influences even further—inspired, she says, by the singer-songwriters she grew up listening to. The songs feel lived-in and familiar; several times while listening to the record, I paused a song to try to place what it reminded me of. I realized it didn’t sound quite like anything, but it inspired this strange feeling of recognition, like it’s always existed.

Over Zoom in late August, I ask Gavin whether releasing a debut that is also her fourth album still feels like a debut. “Maybe it’s a debut of a certain, slightly more human-size part of myself,” she says. “It’s a debut of something that’s a little more intimate—that didn’t fit up until now in the Muna world.”

A Muna song becomes part of the Muna world through an alchemy that even Gavin can’t quite explain. “It’s kind of one of those things where you just have to be in the room when we are talking about it,” she says. She was sitting on a trove of unreleased songs when Muna signed to the Dead Oceans imprint Saddest Factory in 2021. The songs had been an outlet that allowed her to grow in a different direction from the main project, even if unintentionally. Writing for Muna, especially after the band “started becoming a real thing,” came with all these preconceptions about who the band was, what they sounded like, what constituted a Muna song. The important thing, for Gavin, was to keep writing. She brought recordings she’d made to Bridgers, now her label boss, to discuss making them into a record. “I just knew that it was going to be good for me—and Naomi and Jo knew this too,” she says. “If I have songs that I really care about, I want them to be out and I want people to be interacting with them.”

Gavin recorded What a Relief with the producer Tony Berg (who also produced both of Bridgers’s albums) at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles earlier this year. “When Katie came in, she really came into the studio as a songwriter,” says the musician Nana Adjoa, who engineered and played bass on the record. “She’s really open to trying stuff. She knows what she wants, but there’s no ego.”

During Gavin’s sessions, Berg was recording with another artist: Sarah McLachlan. It was an unexpected alignment, given the inspiration Gavin found in Lilith Fair, the music festival that McLachlan organized in 1997. “Any music where people of marginalized genders are exploring their identities as subjects in a nuanced way,” Gavin says, “that doesn’t concern itself primarily with being likable or fuckable, is exciting to me.”

As Gavin situates herself more explicitly within this lineage, especially of queer musicians, something peculiar has started happening. She keeps ending up in rooms with artists associated with Lilith, like Ani DiFranco, Alanis Morissette, and the Indigo Girls. As soon as she started “putting out this energy of ‘let me pass the torch,’” she says, the universe started listening. “I’m just reflecting on how much we owe to the queers who came before us, who were out and creating these places for gays to gather before it was seen as marketable or profitable,” Gavin wrote on Instagram after performing with the Indigo Girls in September.

You might even say that Gavin is now one of those people. From the start, Muna shows have been places for gays to gather, but now the rooms have gotten bigger: last year, the band opened for Taylor Swift on the Eras tour and sold out consecutive nights at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. Gavin’s fall solo tour is already sold out, save for one night. (A comment on her tour announcement: “Katie I’m begging you to add another Boston show I can’t fight every lesbian in Cambridge.”) I wonder: How does she balance making herself accessible to her audience, especially as that audience has grown, while still maintaining some boundaries?

“I think we are at a level where it hasn’t taken a detrimental toll on our mental health,” she says. “We’ve walked a really fine line for a long time of, like, we’re gay-famous.” She cites Chappell Roan as a counterpoint: “I can really understand with an artist like Chappell—who has skyrocketed so quickly and become so massive—you don’t have any type of access to a normal life all of a sudden,” she says. “That would blow,” she continues, “and I think it’s cool that she’s changing the conversation around what people can ask for from artists.” (After we spoke, Muna posted a statement on Instagram about toxic fan behavior.) When Chappell Roan withdrew from All Things Go last month, Muna took over the festival’s headlining spot. “We started as a queer band in 2014 and we’ve been given the time and the grace to be nourished as artists, and we wish nothing but that times a million for her,” Gavin said during the show.

When Gavin sets out on tour this fall, accompanied by Adjoa, she’s going to play the fiddle parts herself. They wanted to challenge themselves, Adjoa says, to be ambitious. In the scheme of things, this might just be a tiny evolution. But it’s an evolution nevertheless.