From Little Birdy To A Fully Fledged Soloist

With Little Birdy put to bed, Katy Steele moved to New York to find her own sound and make a solo album. "I'm independent, so I do what I want," she jokes, sipping a coffee while on the phone to us from WA.

But her newfound independence involved some difficult soul searching to find her voice. "I took my time, it had to be right. I had a few goes [writing the album] in America and it wasn't really sticking. I was like 'I can't put this out! It's not me!'" Two failed attempts at a record with two different producers later, and "they just weren't really right, so I scrapped them and came back to Perth," she shrugs.

"If you wanna be a soul singer you have to have that pain in your soul otherwise it isn't gonna come through."

Steele is open about her struggle with depression and anxiety during this time; a combination of self-imposed pressure - "I was being really, really hard on myself going 'you gotta write a hit song, you gotta do the best record possible'" - and her unfamiliar surroundings.

"It was more to do with the headspace I was in and it was the production I couldn't get across the line - I didn't know what I wanted. Because I had come from Birdy and I had it in my head that I had to do something completely different... but I think sometimes you can take that too far and I think I was just trying to make things maybe not as much about the songs at first," she muses.

Leaving the the band "was completely about challenging myself as an artist and wanting to kinda be in charge of all the production and wanting to have a solid vision just by myself, like I didn't want to share that any more... you have to share it with people, and I kinda didn't wanna any more," she protests with a giggle.

Avoiding the cliche of the folky acoustic singer-songwriter debut record, Human is a textured, rich wall of sound, with the matured voice of Steele weaving through intricate percussion and plenty of gospel tones. Steele chats about the nature of a solo album, the way "you have to have something solid to say and you have to have been somewhere," she suggests. "Like, if you wanna be a soul singer you have to have that pain in your soul otherwise it isn't gonna come through, and that's kinda what happened to me. I went through some crazy depression and experienced anxiety like I've never experienced it before and that was really a jolt to the system because I'd never really been that debilitated before, you know?"

Not that New York was "doing my nut in!" she enthuses, "it just kinda aggravated the anxiety." Channelling Bjork in an moment of inspiration, Steele "walked around for like a week recording all the noises [of New York] and I'm pretty sure that didn't help my anxiety because if you actually notice how many noises are going on, like, it would drive you mental!" she laughs. It's no wonder that the peace and familiarity of Perth was what she needed to finish the record.