the water comes back: New music from Katie Callahan
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Katie Callahan is a thirty-something singer, songwriter, artist, and mother who grew up in Hawaii and is currently living in Baltimore. Her folksy music and lyrical melodies feel nostalgic, familiar, but with each listen, a layer peels back to reveal a raw emotional honesty and courageous exploration of difficult subjects. “I never make a good first impression,” Katie often jokes. “You have to meet me twice.” But if you look and listen closely, you’ll see the groundwork she lays for a quiet but simmering revolution, all the complexity of an internal landscape laid bare.
After releasing Get It Right—a collection of songs written over the previous 12 years and recorded with friends—in 2019, Katie sent her album to the info@ email of her forever-favorite band Jars of Clay website along with a note saying thank you for a lifetime of inspiration. To her utter shock, she received a reply from Charlie Lowell (Jars of Clay, Hollow Hum), and put Katie in touch with his Jars of Clay bandmate, Matthew Odmark to begin collaborating as producer and artist. Through 2020 and the pandemic, Katie met via Zoom with Matt, Dan Haseltine (Jars of Clay), and Louis Johnson (Lone Wave, The Saint Johns, Lonas) to discuss demos, co-write, and plan what would become her second record, The Water Comes Back, which was recorded in a whirlwind two weeks at Gray Matters Studio in Nashville in January of 2021.
The story of The Water Comes Back began with Katie unravelling a lifelong journey with evangelical Christianity, the warped beliefs about goodness and worth ascribed by purity culture, and her power and role as a woman in the world. In addition to faith transition, The Water Comes Back tackles themes of feminine strength and identity with tracks like “Witches,” a haunting, swirling song that challenges the vilification of women who push against patriarchal, heteronormative rule of law, and “Lullaby” which Katie calls “a song written to myself, a way to remind myself that I am enough.” “Low Tide,” which acts both as the emotional crux and resolution, is about seeing the limitations of capacity within different phases of life, wrestling with it, and accepting it as part of a larger rhythmic narrative of birth, life, death, and rebirth.
Reflecting on her past project, Katie said, “Get It Right has songs that are all about men in one way or another--former lovers, strangers, spouses, brothers, fathers. But The Water Comes Back is about women. It’s about taking up space. Moving freely. Singing loudly. And almost every time there’s a lyric about ‘you,’ it can be replaced with ‘me.’ It’s a record about honestly looking at identity, and about sadness and pain and joy and triumph all held together.”
Katie Callahan is an artist and a mother. She cries at commercials, bakes her feelings, and most often would rather be by the ocean. She writes music that tells the truth as she sees it, a rich internal landscape of churning currents, seasons changing, and the tide coming in and out, quietly challenging the narratives that keep people at odds with themselves. “When people hear my songs, I want them to feel seen and I want them to feel brave,” she says. “Like they don’t have to hide anything from anybody or themselves.”
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katiecallahanmusic@gmail.com
@katie_callahan_music
