She sings and plays the piano, trombone, trumpet and horn. German musician Catt is more or less a one-woman band in her own right. Last year she released a brilliant debut album, the title of which is a most poignant expression of the current mood: Why, Why. This questioning and searching is also what characterises her sound, which expresses a tremendous longing somewhere reminiscent of Bon Iver and Norah Jones. We talked to Catt via video call about her wishes and her origins, and how to find out what you really want as opposed to what you think you want.
SLEEK: The biggest problem with the topic of desire is probably that it’s so difficult to find out what it actually is.
Catt: Yes, I ask myself that too. Is it some kind of inner wish? If it is, there are probably different types of desire.
SLEEK: And they are…?
Catt: Wishes pop up in us all the time. But which ones really matter? Which ones define us, drive us? My wishes might not actually be inherently mine; I might just think they are – because we often engage with wishes that come in from outside as well, that we’ve somehow “learned”, and that make us think they have to be fulfilled in order for us to be a complete person.
SLEEK: But how can you differentiate between them?
Catt: Last year I started writing my wishes down so I could take a more detailed look at them. It was like peeling off my outer layers to see what’s actually behind them. As a musician, for example, you have a desire to be loved and admired. But that wish for confirmation is totally dependent on agreement from the outside world. If you peel that back though, you find that – at least in my case – it’s more about my own expression.
"If a song starts by being about a situation where there’s no way out, I always search for hope, resolution or realisation."
SLEEK: But it could be a bit like an onion: you peel off the layers one by one to get to the inside, only to find there is no real inside. So you’re just the sum of all your layers.
Catt: All the layers certainly shape the way we behave, but I still think we all have an unchanging core of personality traits within us. The onion layers might be an expression of our underlying longing – because desire has to do with longing as well.
SLEEK: And longing, in turn, is what’s in your music. I can’t really say how specific it is, but there is a sense of yearning underpinning your music.
Catt: That’s why my album’s called Why, Why. There’s this constant questioning that then makes you long for answers – questions about all sorts of things. If a song starts by being about a situation where there’s no way out, I always search for hope, resolution or realisation.
SLEEK: Metaphorically speaking, it’s about expansive fields of opportunity. For me, your music mainly calls to mind landscapes – but then that could be because of the videos I’ve seen.
Catt: Well, I come from a small village that’s just three houses in the middle of a forest. As a child I was always outdoors, so nature is integral to what I am. I live in Berlin nowadays, but in early 2020 I was lucky enough to win a scholarship that meant I could do my writing in a house in the woods on the outskirts of Hamburg. When I’m writing my lyrics, nature so often helps me to describe things and make them comprehensible. Last year I was yearning for fresh air and the horizon, so I often went out into the countryside.
SLEEK: They say horizons have a calming effect on people. If you’re feeling stressed, your eyes need something that’s wide and preferably flat to rest on.
Catt: That makes perfect sense to me, especially if you’re feeling a bit trapped in your thoughts. If you get out of the house for an hour, you always come back feeling freer and more ordered.
SLEEK: When you write a song, how do you start? You’ve got your piano, your trombone, your voice, your lyrics …
Catt: I usually start with fragments of text, observations I’ve jotted down in my notebook while I’m out and about. So when I’m sitting at the piano, I make use of these fragments, which then become my first ideas for a song. After that I move on to my other instruments and record voices, and sometimes wind instruments as well.
SLEEK: But wind instruments are a constant in your work, aren’t they?
Catt: Sure, because I play trombone, trumpet and horn. People are always really surprised when I show up on stage with a trombone!
SLEEK: How long have you been playing these instruments?
Catt: We always had a grand piano at home, which I’ve been playing ever since I was big enough to reach the keyboard. I started lessons when I was six. I got into the wind instruments because of the church brass band. My parents were heavily involved in church music, so by the time I was eight or nine, I’d been given a trombone.
SLEEK: And when did you start writing your own songs?
Catt: The official answer would be 2018, which is when I released my first song, ‘Moon’. As for the unofficial answer: I recently came across some old cassettes. When I was little, I had a cassette player, so from the age of about six I started recording pieces which I’d improvised on the piano. I’d play around with chords and sing over the top – and I made my brothers join in too! So that was the point when I noticed that I’ve probably been writing songs all my life. At about 11, I started writing fake English pop songs when I was alone at home and nobody else could hear. That more or less went on throughout my whole childhood and youth, without me really realising.
SLEEK: But if you released your first song in 2018, you can’t have decided just the month before that you were going to make music.
Catt: No, that happened in 2014 when I moved to Berlin to study music production and be a musician. It was quite a spontaneous decision because I come from a rural area. I was about to apply for an internship in Costa Rica, but then purely by coincidence I came across this school of music. I thought, Wow. Production and composition? That’s what I want to do! It was a gut decision at the time, but I actually think that subconsciously I’d been working towards it all my life. Even as a child I’d spend my time at an old Windows 95 machine composing orchestrations with a special program. That came back to me just recently. There were signs pointing me towards music the whole time, it’s just that nobody could actually show me the path that would get me there. I didn’t even realise that such a path existed.
SLEEK: It looks to me as though everything we’ve talked about points toward the core of this onion.
Catt: The fact that I’ve found music as a means of expression has certainly been a theme throughout my life, even in the more restricted environment I grew up in. Music gave me the space to spread my wings. It was a kind of parallel world that increasingly became my main world. Music supported my longing to be as I am.
By Harald Peters
Photography: Jan Zühlke
Dress: DIOR
Furniture: Vetsak