Katie Lindsay on her debut EP, Believe: Mistranscribed Lyrics, Identity Crisis, and Keeping Malleable

Such is the Glasgow music scene, it’s common to see one musician in a couple of bands. Some performers though, could stage a festival day with all of the acts they’re in. Her own website suggests Katie Lindsay is one of the busiest musicians in Glasgow, and we’re not going to argue against that. 

SNACK caught up with Katie to discuss her debut EP, wrong lyrics and just what is a singer-songwriter.

Your debut EP is out now. Why is it called Believe?

It’s called Believe after the title track. This EP has a very long and winding story. The oldest song on the EP, ‘Free’, I wrote when I was 16 years old, the day that I got my first electric guitar for my 16th birthday. But then I had sort of an identity crisis when I was just near the end of recording it all, and I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is the kind of music I wanna be making.’ And then I put the project to bed and disappeared for years. 

The start of last year, I finally came back to it and sat down with my pals, got it all mixed and sounding good. I loved it and then I was sick of it. And now I kind of love it again from afar.

With the songs hailing from your past, is it a different person, and is that maybe gonna impact on how you play them live?

Oh, yeah, definitely. I’ve actually spent the last two weeks relearning how to play them all on guitar because I totally forgot. I’ve had to get the old electric guitar out, find all my old guitar pedals, learn how to do it all again. I do feel like a totally different person than when I wrote the songs, but it’s almost nice to have the disconnect, ’cause I’m not too precious about them.

At SNACK, we loved ‘Believe’, and one of the things we shouted out was a fantastic guitar solo, so it might be a good time to talk about who else played on the record.

That guitar solo is by my very good friend, Ivan Iacono. I wanted a guitar solo, and I went to him and I was like, ‘I need you to write a lead part for this’. He wrote the most beautiful guitar lines. All the guitar on the whole album is played by him.

You posted about a streaming platform getting one of your lyrics wrong.

Oh my gosh, yeah. I just opened Spotify the other day. It was my song ‘Sun In A Bowl’. It had these lyrics there that I had not put there. ‘Sun In A Bowl’ is a really meaningful song to me that I wrote about falling in love with nature and having to leave a place that you love behind. 

There’s a part where I sing, ‘This day is for the hills and for toes in the ground.’ And Spotify has instead decided the lyrics are, ‘This day is for toes in the mouth,’ which is absolutely not what my song is about.

Your degree portfolio was about the role of a singer-songwriter. Did you come to any conclusions?

What I decided was that songs are never really finished. You’ll record it in the studio, and you’ll put it out, and that’s one version of the song. But every time you get up on stage to perform it, the song will have changed slightly because you’ve changed slightly. 

So I think the role of a singer-songwriter is to be malleable and open to that, not too precious about keeping things the same.

Believe is out now