#INTERVIEW Catey Shaw chats about art & music

On Feb 11, 2016, singer-songwriter Catey Shaw from Brooklyn, New York returned to Toronto for her North American Tour.  Shaw performed at The Rivoli for an intimate show with opening acts Featurette and Parallels. 

Shaw first made her debut with her single “Brooklyn Girls” and is definitely the furthest thing from a one-hit wonder. After releasing her recent EP for “Human Contact” , Shaw’s artsy and catchy songs shows fans exactly why she is bound to leave a huge mark in the music scene. Shaw performed some of her hit songs including “Walks all over you” “The Ransom” “Human Contact” and one of my personal favourites “Night go slow”. Shaw drew in a full crowd, where almost everyone in the crowd knew each and every single lyric.

Prior to Shaw’s performance, we caught up with the talented singer to chat about life on tour and how art impacts her music.

You’ve been to Toronto before. What would you say is the biggest change from then and now?
I got to drive along Queen Street a lot longer this time, It’s amazing for how long it goes. All those cool shops, I thought it would be like a smaller more condensed area, but it just keeps going. I want to really explore, but it’s kinda cold.

How would you describe the creative aspect to your music?
My friend Bryan Russell Smith, he actually just left us in Chicago and was with us on the tour. We been directing all the videos together, we’re great friends and I’ll go over to his apartment and do pre-production for a video for about a month. We’ll just brainstorm and find ways to do it for as cheap as possible and we usually end up doing the grunt work ourselves. Just to make that product, he does a really amazing job but I’m able to kind of use that, my visual voice through him, cause I’m more of a painter and I do the music, but I don’t really know video. So he kinda takes over and we team up on that.

So for example, your video “Brooklyn Girls” it’s very artsy and very creative. What was your contribution to it?
That was actually one of my first videos. That was kind of the one that made me decide to start being a part of the creative process for the videos. We had this director that had this great resume that we heard about. We gave him a pretty sizeable budget and had him come in and did what he thought he should for the money he was getting. But I don’t think he was really passionate about it or cared so much so after everything that happened with that video, seeing it and myself being someone that specializes in self-portraiture, so the second I let someone else make that portrait for me, I think it kind of got away. So ever since that video, starting with “Human Contact” and moving forward I’ve been a huge part of that process and it’s very important to me that I’m the one describing myself. No one else is really going to understand except for me. So it’s really important for me to have that voice now.

It’s been awhile since that video was first released. How would you say your music is different from then to now?
Well the “Brooklyn” EP is kind of like a sampler. When I was exploring pop music and really figuring out what it meant to me. Then the recordings came before a lot of the live performances, we been performing those songs for two years now and they weren’t performed for much before they were released. So they kind of taken on a new life and kind of shown me new side of what I love about music and the kind of music I want to make. The stuff we’re making now is much much more informed by the live show, which we’ve learned from playing those older songs after the fact. After they were released.

As an artist, what’s more important when performing?
Oh god, I mean songwriting is very important. What kind of gets me off about music is this connection that you get with another person, which I didn’t necessarily get from painting as much. I’ve painted my whole life, it was very much just for me and something that was a solo experience and for me that was kind of my own head. And what I love about songwriting is the same thing I love about performing live, which is when you’re writing and something hits and you know it’s right thing . Both people light up and you spark up and we get excited and you know we’re feeling and hearing the same thing. It’s the same thing I love about performing on stage is being in a room with people and seeing them in the eye and recognizing we’re both feeling the same thing. That’s the most important thing, is connecting with people and having that human connection, that universal thing is the best thing about pop music is that everybody kind of gets it. It’s all about communication as far as I’m concerned.

So fan interaction is most important?
Definitely. Just feeling the room and the togetherness of it, is totally the point of it for me.

Do you think it’s important then for fans to see both sides of everything? As in your stage personality and real life personality?
I think it’s one big package. I think the way that we understand artists we are informed about their personal lives, little things here and there and even before the internet and all that people were fascinated with the lives of the musicians they listen to and the lives of the painters that they loved and all the history behind it. So I think that depending on where you want to fit in to that, it’s important for me to have all that information available.

 So what’s next for you in music?
Well I want to get the album out. We just finished writing most of it. I think it’s pretty much done just wrapping up some production stuff and trying to make sure it’s kind of a synced package and it kind of revealed itself what the theme is and what it means . I been writing this album unknowingly for a couple years now and all this stuff kind of fits together. So I’m just really excited to get it packed and just get it ready to go and start hitting the ground on that and tour the summer away.

We’re all about The Xtra Mile. How do you go The Xtra Mile?
This tour specifically I have been running everything myself. It’s been a lot of The Xtra Mile, running the backstage and front of stage, and driving the van and doing the hotels and taking care of everything. We have a couple of substitute players that aren’t my normal people, so we had to rehearse them . So this whole tour has kind of been like me doing every job at the same time. I’m literally doing everything right now and it’s extremely empowering the same way that it’s stressful and I think that I’m trying to learn how to take on scary stressful things that I don’t know how to do and use that as an opportunity to be empowered and to know that I can do it, even if it’s scary.

Check out Catey Shaw’s video for “The Ransom” below!