An Interview With Katy Moffatt

 By Pat King

Katy Moffat’s career could have ended shortly after it began. In the mid-seventies, the Texan songwriter was scooped up and signed to a major label during a transitional period where Country music was becoming a little more self-aware of how archaic it had become. But with how reluctant old dogs are with learning new skill sets, Nashville didn’t quite know what to do with Moffat, as she was a little more hard-edged for the industry dead-set on pumping out sugary hits. Had she come on the scene just a decade later, instead of being forced to blaze the trail to follow, Moffat would have been welcomed with open arms in the Americana and Alt-Country scenes that are thriving today.

After struggling to find her voice on major labels, Moffat, with her back against the wall, went into one of the most rewarding creative periods that would go on to define her career as an artist. Teaming up with guitarist Andrew Hardin, she would go on to release a trilogy of albums -- Walking on the Moon, Angel Town, and Fewer Things -- that would strip her sound down to the bare essentials; just two guitars and her emotive voice. With Moon released in 1989, Moffat and Hardin would reconnect for the following albums 10-years apart from each other with the same in-the-room intensity of their first recordings. With this collection, Moffat has selected the best tracks from these sessions on one satisfying collection. I recently caught up with Moffat to talk about this long and rewarding project and the power of staying true to your vision.      

When you released your first record Katy back in 1976, your arrival has been credited with the creation of what we know now today as “Alt-Country” and “Americana” music. What was the landscape of country music like during that time?

Well, all I really knew was that I was so new to the music industry. I was just learning about everything as I went along. I had literally never been to Nashville before. Although, my brother had lived there for a few years and was making his way as a Nashville writer and he began doing quite well. But, I had not been there until the day that I went to go make that first record with Billy Sherril producing. It was quite a shock to me because Billy was like the king of Nashville at that time. He was on top and he was also the head of all CBS products. He was the head of Epic and Columbia. I was being signed and ultimately was signed, although I was ultimately confused about that for a couple of years, by a fellow in A&R on the West Coast in the Pop division. The guy who signed me at the time was not as powerful in the entire company of Columbia as Billy Sherril was.

They sent me to audition for Billy in his hotel room at the Toronto CBS convention. They all said, “This is just a formality, he’s not going to want to work with you.” But what had been happening, [was] for the first time in years some of his records were being knocked off the top of the charts by, what he viewed as “Progressive Country” like Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson. Billy was always a very forward-looking guy, in all aspects. A lot of people don’t know that about him. He was doing things that nobody else in Nashville would have done at the time. He wanted to hear anything that could be considered “Progressive Country” before anybody else did. Because he was so powerful, I was sent to do this audition in his hotel room. I was assured [by people at Columbia] , “He’s not going to like you. He’s not going to want to do it. We’ll concede. It will get you signed a little more slowly but we’ll do it. We’re going to make this work.”

Everyone was shocked, including me, when 15-minutes later after I had done this audition, that he had sent the word down that he wanted to produce my first record. So, that’s how I entered Nashville and the country music landscape. I really didn’t know anything about it other than what my brother had been writing to me in letters about his progress in Nashville. But Billy was such a great producer for me. Looking back, I have to say, he was one of two guys, and I have worked with an awful lot of different producers in different stripes, that he and Steve Berlin were the two that I most loved working with. They would try anything, they were fearless. Billy was fearless. He knew where he was very comfortable and where he was not comfortable but he was not afraid to go there. Ultimately he knew what he thought was going to work best. That’s how I walked through that door. It was a time of a shakeup in what had been the status quo of records coming out of Nashville and coming into Country radio.

When I auditioned for him, I played three original songs. It was really kind of unnerving. It was him and Norro Wilson, who was another Nashville producer and a good friend of Billy’s. They didn’t really say anything at all while I was playing these songs, but they would kind of smirk at certain lines. I was like, “Holy shit, what’s going on here?” [laughs]. As I said, I was really shocked when he said he wanted to produce me.

When we got into the studio, it was thrilling to record in the manner that Billy recorded. Some of my early heroes, like Ella Fitzgerald for example, the records that Billy made were recorded in much the same way that Ella’s records were recorded. Everyone, all of the musicians, and even the background singers were in one room together. The drums were there, too! All in a circle. We really recorded live and it was all done really quickly. Of course, they destroyed the room eventually. It was Studio B which was an old closet hut in Nashville. But the sound of the room itself was such that you could actually do that. There wasn’t any of the separation and the producing of [the] drums and vocalists that had been going on for quite a while in pop music. That was just absolutely exciting and inspiring and I loved the process.            

When you associate records produced by Billy Sherril at Studio B in Nashville, you immediately think of the big country production of the time. What was the inspiration behind stripping away all of the layers and focusing on the basics with the first album in your trilogy with Andrew Hardin, Walking on the Moon? 

There was a lot in between. There was a 10 year period between my last recording for Columbia. My time with Columbia was fraught with a lot of political problems because Columbia didn’t know what to do with someone who was not easily put into one category and to not be counted on to stay [laughs]. But that was my experience for four-years at Columbia. Then there was a 10-year period… I made a record that was the worst imaginable production period for me. It was pretty discouraging. This was for MCA. The record company had hit a ditch and went belly-up. Before the album could be released, I had a few singles. It was a godsend because that album had little to do with who I was. It’s the only record that I’ve made where I felt that way about it. Granted, it never saw the light of day. But, there were 10-years between album releases before Walking on the Moon. It was an adjustment, of course. When I found myself in Switzerland, I had done a festival that had become a pretty significant singer-songwriter festival in Switzerland, I played this festival and was scouted by another Swiss man who had another festival on the Eastern-side of the country. After I played his festival, this Swiss man said he wanted to get into the music business. He wanted to become my representative in Europe. I said, “Okay, let’s try it and I’ll tell you everything I know about this. If you want to do it, let’s do it. But, we’re going to have to have a record.”

An artist needs a record as a calling card and also as a representation that you can send to other places. There wasn’t a budget, per se, because there wasn’t a record company, per se. But there we were in this little town in Switzerland. I happened to know that Andy Hardin was in the country and had three days off and had a Euro pass. So, I found him and asked him, “How about it? Do you want to come and make a little record in a couple of days?” He said, “Sure.”

So, we went into the only studio in that little town which was, as Andy said, an underequipped voiceover studio. It was a funky little place. We had to do it at night because it was a basement and the cars that would drive around before dark would have been recorded [laughs]. So, we did this little record just the two of us. Mostly two acoustic guitars and one voice in a couple of days with very inadequate equipment. We didn’t care, we were gonna do it anyway! That’s how Walking on the Moon came about. It was so very much a live record. It was stripped down as a necessity.

The first production was, of course, an LP. But then, I thought I’d see if any companies would be interested in licensing. I took it to Ken Irwin at Rounder [Records] to see if he was interested in licensing this for the US and Canada. He came back to me and he said yes was interested but he’d like to flesh it out a little bit. He said he’d like to maybe put a mandolin on it. But this was Rounder Records. They were the preeminent and, at the time, one of the only independent record companies known for acoustic music. But, it had been so long since anyone had heard anything this bare. This was before the “[MTV] Unplugged” thing happened. He naturally wanted to make it into something that was more familiar. But, this was also my first time in my time in the music business where I was able to say, “No, this is the record! Do you want it or not?” He said, “Okay, we’ll take it. We want it”. But, it was a struggle. Because it was before the “Unplugged” thing happened. I wasn’t sure when that thing occurred, but it wasn’t in ‘88, that’s for sure.     

Early on, was that kind of directness something that inspired and drew you to folk and country music in the first place?

I wouldn’t say that that was the thing that drew me [in]. Almost always, it was about what I had to work with. The other thing, of course, was the music itself. The songs. The instrumentation and the acoustic guitar and the harmonies that fall between an acoustic guitar and a voice. Because that’s all I had to work with. When I was growing up in Fort Worth, I certainly knew of and went to school with some people who played guitar but we were not on speaking terms [laughs]. These were upperclassmen and I was just a kid! So, I didn’t know anyone to sit around and learn this with. I was just working with what I had which was my voice. I got a really cheap guitar, my memory was from Montgomery Ward. It was what I could have. It was cheap enough where I could have it. I got a chord book and started teaching myself. I listened [to music] all the time. I was really captured by Top 40 radio, at that point. But then, after The Beatles suddenly hit the airwaves, that just did it for me…

The earliest live stuff that I would go and see, because our parents took us, were musicals. During that era, of the late 50s and early 60s, those were some of the greatest musicals that we’ve ever seen, I think, were being generated in the public eye at that point. I saw everything that came through town and I was listening to, because my father had it on all of the time, Gilbert and Sullivan. Which was this layered harmonic kind of stuff and was so emotive and appealing to me, coupled with these lyrics that were hilarious. In the case of the musicals, they were very romantic. But the layers of harmonies, I thought I had heard that again when I heard The Beatles. That’s when I got that cheap department store guitar. Eventually, I did meet a Fort Worth guy who was going to Princeton. He would come back to Fort Worth and he would tell me about what was going on in the North East. At that time, of course, it was all of this great acoustic folk music. Songwriters like Bob Dylan and interpreters like Tom Rush, who is also a songwriter. Judy Collins. Through Judy Collins I found Leonard Cohen and then Joni Mitchell. All of these influences were pouring in at this point. Gordon Lightfoot was another one. I would be compelled by a number of these songs to really want to express them in my own way. I was so limited because I had no real training or real guidance. So, I had my versions of them and that is what is idiosyncratic about my musicality. In many cases, it’s an impatience to really sing a song and perform it in some way. The only accompaniment that I had was my own guitar. So, the limitations were creating my own idiosyncratic style. That, of course, has continued [laughs].      

Each of these records was released a decade apart, with more electric records in between. What significance did that hold in your mind? Did stripping things back down with Angel Town and Fewer Things feel refreshing?

It does in retrospect, but at the time it was all about the necessity and what my limitations were. What I learned, in retrospect, is that this kind of thing can happen if there is no money involved [laughs]. It’s pretty important to have disinterested money, like a donation from somebody. Fewer Things was made by a record donation by a guy who I had worked for many times. He thought it was time for me to make another record. I had this tiny budget that was disinterested. It was not going to meddle in any way. He did not want to have a voice in the production of this. Angel Town was the same. It was all out of necessity. There was a tour that I had in New Zealand and Australia. Once again, I needed a record. It was just an agent who wanted to book a tour for me, a rather extensive tour for me. We needed a record. So, I just cobbled together what I had. It wasn’t much. I called Andy and went to Brooklyn where he lived. We went to a small studio. It, too, was a very analog studio. It was minimal but we didn’t need much. We made Angel Town in three days. We recorded for two days and mixed and mastered that second day at the end of the recording. We mastered it on the third day. That’s what I remembered. But it was all out of necessity and it was all born out of and shaped by the specific limitations of the budget. That was such a blessing because that meant that no one was going to want to have a voice in what we were doing. Then ten-years later this happened again with Fewer Things. Which I mentioned was a donation of money to make a record. A small budget but we were used to doing that and it was disinterested money. That’s what I found. That in-between these other projects that were more produced and there was interested money and producers had a particular vision with what they wanted to be doing with me in the studio, in-between those projects, I found myself needing a record to make a tour work. And that’s how these three records came to be. Andy was always the go-to call because we had done this. So, we found the time and the place to do it two other times. Really, if either one of us had been experiencing tremendous success in our careers, this would not ever have happened. It would not be possible. It’s funny how this whole thing came to be.       

 Listening back to these records, do they still hit you in a powerful way? What sticks out to you the most?

It’s quite a journey of memory. The first one, Walking on the Moon, being done wholly in a three-day period in Switzerland. That has a lot of visual memory to it as well. Some of the songs like “Mr. Banker”, that was one where when I had some downtime I would jam with this weekend warrior band. A bunch of guys who were not playing for a living, but they would get together in one of their garages and crank up some amps and jam. That’s where “Mr. Banker” came from. One of the guys who jammed with us in that way was a banker [laughs].

Are these recordings still powerful for you?

Oh yeah. And I have to admit, my favorite one is the one farthest away from me, which is the Walking on the Moon record. But what did strike me, looking at what could be a viable retrospective and [why] they have a reason to exist as a collection with these three records is the fact that they really did all come out of probably the most freedom in all choices involved with making a record that I’ve ever had. It’s because there wasn’t any money. There wasn’t any money and there wasn’t any interest in money. That’s what makes these three records really special to me. There wasn’t anybody who was trying to present “Katy Moffat” in a particular way. It was just music that I could make with a great guitar player who really had similar sensibilities and respect for the songs. The name Chrysalis and the reason why that came and is the perfect title to me for this collection is because of what a “Chrysalis” is. It’s a safe place with no one interfering for transformation into something real to occur.