New Wings

Little Birdy doesn't look like Little Birdy to Katy Steele. At least, not the Little Birdy the rest of Australia grew to love over the course of their eight-year career. To the rest of us, Little Birdy looked like a nation-conquering rock outfit led by one of our country's most charismatic and gifted female musicians. To Katy Steele, Little Birdy looked like something else entirely: adolescence. “Little Birdy was like me having the training wheels on,” she reflects of the period. “That's how it felt. I can listen back to our music and appreciate what it was but it's so far from who I am now. It was just me growing up through the music. Listening to it is like reading your first diary. I'm proud of what we did. I think we wrote some good songs. I think I'd be a pretty shitty artist if I didn't move on from that, though.”

This is largely why Australia hasn't heard much from Katy Steele over the past three years. She's been growing up. When Little Birdy announced their indefinite hiatus in early 2010, Steele had already high-tailed it out of the country and into blissful anonymity in New York. Ostensibly to work on her debut solo album. In actuality, she was equally invested in outrunning her own adolescence. “I've gone through the shittest time I've ever gone through in my whole life,” she admits of her time in New York - laughing. “The first year I was there, I was so depressed. Just horribly depressed. The second year, things got better. I started to make the music that I wanted to make and started remembering who I was and that I was a real person. That I was something more than that girl from Little Birdy.

“You know, that I'm not just some chick from some band. I'm more than that,” she emphasises. “I just went through this crazy growth period. Even just musically. You know, Little Birdy was my band. I wrote all the tunes. It was still a band, though. There were always opinions and different ideas flying around. It was great to just have the freedom to do anything. If I wanted a drum beat, I wrote a drum beat, you know?”

She hasn't approached that process half-heartedly, either. As yet untitled, Steele's forthcoming album is an emphatically solo endeavour. The singer wrote and played every note of the record. Already impressive, that piece of trivia becomes more so when one learns that Steele hasn't made a conventional solo record. This is not an album of acoustic guitar. It's a noisy, electronic, lively recording of layers and orchestration.

“The sound I had in my head was way more rhythmic. My first year in New York, I was writing a whole bunch of songs. By the time I got settled in New York, I had a whole album ready to go. I've still got that album just sitting there. Except, they're acoustic. They didn't sound like Little Birdy exactly but they were acoustic and intimate and, you know, songwriter's songs. I didn't want to make that kind of record.

“I didn't want to make a side project. I wanted to make a really strong, rhythmic, punchy, electro, dancey... You know, in-your-face, kind of statement record. A real kind of powerhouse record. So, obviously, me writing these folky little dinky songs weren't really helping me get to what I wanted to achieve. So, in the second year, I really started digging around a bit.” It's an impressive show of commitment from an established artist. Steele isn't simply experimenting with a new style. She's learning an entire new array of skills and instruments. The singer-songwriter tackled drum machines, samplers, MIDI, synthesis and all manner of electronics. A far cry from the country and soul flavours of Little Birdy's 2009 record, Confetti.

“I pulled out some drum machines, I started playing around with tempo, I dug up samples, I learnt about MIDI. That's when things actually started kicking along, when I actually started producing stuff. There was definitely a teething period. Some of the early stuff was so bad. You know, that's just what happens when you're learning new stuff.

“You know, when you're learning songwriting, you write five songs; four that suck and one that's good. That's the way it went with me playing around with these new drum machines and instruments,” she laughs. “Some of the early drum beats were just so bad. It was just trial and error. You know, I worked my arse off, man. On everything. Every single song that's on this new album is really strong.” While some may point out that Steele has ventured down this path before (with Little Birdy's synth-heavy 2006 album, Hollywood), she's confidently insistent that no one's heard her like this before on record. It's something else. More than anything, Steele seems determined to burn down her house with this album. In an ideal world, one suspects there would be nothing of Katy Steele of Little Birdy left by record's end.

“There are actually a few similarities but I think what I've done is way more indie. I think Hollywood was like the biggest, most polished recording we could get our hands on. It was total pop. I feel like the new stuff I've done is way dirtier. The rhythms are way heavier. Really, it's just better,” she says, before bursting into laughter. “You know, it has a really interesting sound to it. I'm not just saying that because it's mine either.

“I mean, it's really heavily influenced by dance music but, it's funny, because I know nothing about dance music. I'm from a songwriting background,” she reflects, still chuckling. “It's pop but it's got these weird dance sounds. All the production is whacky because it's me experimenting with MIDI for the first time. A lot of the sounds are really full on... Like, some fucked-up sample pumped through an old mellotron. Just weird shit.” Steele is retaining her independent outlook throughout all facets of the album's production. Opting to release the album herself, Steele's forthcoming solo effort will arrive without any kind of marketing plan or swell. As yet, it has neither release date nor lead single. The only taste audiences have had so far is an album cut she's put up for free on Bandcamp - the noisy, shuffling Fire Me Up.

“People have told me they'd have a lot of trouble marketing it, so I'm just not going to,” she says off-hand. “I'm just going to make it available and let people talk about it. That's really how all the best music spreads anyway. I'll just have to hope people want to talk about it. At this point, I don't really care what anyone else thinks. I made it. I feel like the strongest person in the world.”

Katy Steele will be playing the following dates:

Thursday 4 April - The Toff In Town, Melbourne VIC
Friday 5 April - Jive Bar, Adelaide SA
Wednesday 10 April - Alhambra Lounge, Brisbane QLD
Thursday 11 April - Artbar, Art Gallery Of WA, Perth WA
Thursday 18 April - The Icon, Karratha WA