.jpg)
Restless to Renewed
Restless to Renewed is more than a podcast—it’s a movement of women daring to reimagine what’s next. Created by women, for women, each episode shares powerful stories of transformation, unexpected journeys, and bold new beginnings. Whether you're seeking purpose, joy, or simply permission to dream again, you’ll find encouragement and real-life inspiration from women who’ve stepped into the unknown and found something more. If you’re ready to rediscover yourself and embrace a life that truly fulfills you, this is your space.
Restless to Renewed
Midlife Melodies: A Musical Journey with Katie Oates
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ever wondered what it takes to pursue a dream later in life? Meet Katie Oates, a remarkable singer and songwriter, who transformed her midlife crisis into a journey of artistic triumph. Katie's story is one of courage, vulnerability, and a relentless pursuit of her passion for music. From serenading church choirs to recording her first album, she shares how she overcame self-doubt and fear to create something truly magical. Her experiences remind us that it’s never too late to follow your heart and redefine what success looks like.
Thank you for listening.
Be sure to visit the Restless to Renewed website for more information at https://www.facebook.com/RestlesstoRenewed.
Welcome to Restless, to Renewed Women, Redefining Midlife and Beyond. I'm your host, Janice Neely, and I want to thank you for listening. Today we have a very interesting guest joining us. Katie Oates is a professional singer and songwriter who's been singing since she was a toddler. Katie's performed in countless settings throughout her career and her music spans a wide variety of music genres. Katie, thank you for coming on the program today.
Speaker 3Thank you so much for having me, Janice.
Speaker 2I'm really happy to be here and to get to talk about your work and just spend some time together. I looked at your website and I was really inspired by your music career, so let's talk about it.
Speaker 3Oh yay.
Speaker 2Speaking of inspiration, what inspired you to become a singer, musician and a songwriter?
Speaker 3So let's talk about it. So I was over at the church all the time and knew him and I sang in choirs. I sang in church, I sang at camp, I sang in music theater in high school. I've done cabaret kind of shows, I've sung arias and oratorios. And then there came a point when my kids were young I just pulled it all back and singing in church, choirs and whatnot.
Speaker 3But as my kids grew up I realized I really needed that outlet again. So I actually helped start a choir for people who were without homes and sang gospel music and learned a whole different way of singing. That really had me letting go, because I was one of those musicians who sat with the piano and sat with the music and this really taught me to let go of the whole process a little bit. But I was really trying to help these folks restore their dreams. Something usually had gone awry in their lives and I found myself more and more just crying when I was at these rehearsals and these folks were a huge comfort to me and I thought this is crazy. I have all these benefits. What on earth is wrong with me? And I realized I was trying to kind of live my dream through them or live my dream through my kids. And I just hit a little bit of a rock bottom and I thought I have been a chicken. You know, I've been hiding behind other people and saying, oh, my husband's got this busy job, or oh, my kids need me, or oh, I should do something for someone else. But the truth of the matter was I was too scared to put myself out there a bit more, and I was so humiliated, in a sense, by that realization that I just doubled down and I thought, okay, what is it you want to do? Well, I thought I've always wanted to record, and so I went into the studio, recorded my very first album called Going Over Home, and it's kind of a tribute to the variety of songs that I used to sing. So there's some arias on there. Some of my favorites are actually really difficult music. It's Emily Dickinson's poems set to Copland's music to sing.
Speaker 3And I just had a great time finally recording my history, because everything I'd always done was ephemeral. You know, you had this one performance and it was gone, and so that was a landmark. And then I decided I would learn the guitar. So I got a guitar teacher and I remember I was talking to a friend who had performed professionally. He said well, why are you going to sing other people's songs? Why don't you write your own? And I just beat red. He said boy, I just scared you, didn't I? And so I was like oh gosh, it wasn't hard enough putting myself out there in all these other ways. I was going to now start to try to learn songwriting. So I went to music camps, I got mentors, I went to conferences, I went to open mics. I can't tell you how many ways to humiliate myself as a beginner. Well, it feels humiliating. I shouldn't put it that way, because people in the audience were loving it.
Speaker 3People love it when you put yourself out there, when you're vulnerable, but it feels so uncomfortable, it feels so bad. It just was the last thing I wanted to do. But because I had reached this low point, I wasn't going to let any of those feelings hold me back anymore, and I knew my kids were watching. I've actually recently had a really lovely exchange with my daughter and she is now leaning into her artistic side and it's been a hard journey for her too and I talked about how I kept pushing through the discomfort because I knew they were watching and I wanted them to see me struggle and keep going. Anyway, musician part came quite early the singing, the performing all my life, that songwriting and that really everything about me on display or vulnerable or whatever. That was midlife and that was crisis in a sense.
Speaker 2You know, I think I identify with this and a lot of people do, because one of the things is, when we put ourselves out there, especially in something that's recorded or on paper or whatever, it's permanent, yeah, and it's different than if you did one engagement and then you walk away and you think, oh, that wasn't good, but hopefully they'll all forget. But once it's permanent, people can critique it whenever and you just have to accept that there will be people who love you and people that don't love you as much, but everybody's different.
Speaker 3Janice, that's a great insight. I actually hadn't completely put together that, but that's part of it. But I'm really terrified of that because in a sense you're always putting just a snapshot of yourself and your feelings out there and nothing is quite the whole picture, and I have a hard time accepting the fact that there are some people who are just not going to like me.
Speaker 2but that is the nature of it. This may be just my observation from my background, but I find often that people who do heavy critiquing aren't quite as willing to put themselves out there.
Speaker 3Ooh, that is so true and I think that's also a little bit of that part of when I was resistant to doing it myself. I know I was judgment. I was like you know, you'd listen to a song on the radio and you'd say, oh, I could do that, I could do that so much better. Or see a voice competition and say, oh yeah, I can sing better than that. But that's exactly it. It's totally different when you're vulnerable and when you're the one out there trying to do it, and none of it is as easy as it looks. And I have now a profound respect for artists, especially young artists, who just leave it all out there and just dare so greatly.
Speaker 2Katie, speaking of being daring, one of the things that I would think would be very difficult for singers and comedians is to go to open mic night and perform. What's your experience with that?
Exploring Middle-Aged Songwriting Journeys
Speaker 3The first piece of advice people always gave me is go to a lot of open mics, and I did, but every single one was incredibly painful to me, and it was because if someone was really nervous and upset, oh my gosh, I would just fall apart with empathy for them. Or someone was really great. Then all of a sudden I thought, well, I'm going to look terrible. I mean, there was almost no scenario where I could then feel comfortable. When I got on stage, and I'm so highly empathetic that by the time I get up there, I've usually absorbed everybody's emotions, insecurities or whatever.
Speaker 2Dealing with our emotions and insecurities is hard for everyone. For instance, hosting this program has been difficult for me and I'm very anxious at times about people listening and critiquing it, but we just have to go forward. And I'm very anxious at times about people critiquing it, but we just have to go forward.
Speaker 3I was just going to say I'm so thrilled to be on this program because I've really never been able to talk to anyone about this precise experience of being at middle age and trying to risk some new things, and I'm thrilled to have found you and your whole community of people and you know I have stories, just like everybody else does, of people being really quite demeaning, shockingly demeaning.
Speaker 2Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah Well yeah, you started out as a toddler, so tell me a little bit about how your music evolved over the years.
Speaker 3You know, as a young child I just loved singing and some of my friends made fun of me just because I'm this little kid and I'm singing, and I got self-conscious and so I stopped singing in front of people, probably around third grade. I would wait until my parents and my sister were all out of the house and then I would play the piano and just sing my heart out. So when I was about eight or nine about the time I stopped singing in my regular life. I started singing at camp because it was this really supportive environment. At camp you sing all the time, and so that's when I really started performing again, but only in really controlled circumstances.
Speaker 3And then in high school I went to boarding school. I was so homesick my first year so I would go to the chapel and play and sing to console myself. And I tried out for a solo for the choir and I bombed. I was so nervous because I hadn't performed outside of camp in years. And the woman who played the piano came into the back of the chapel and heard me singing and she made me audition again and I got the solo that time.
Speaker 3And then I started doing all kinds of things over teens and twenties and then started this journey of writing songs, and so I think part of what's so interesting for me starting songwriting in midlife is I keep pulling from all of the genres that I used to sing in, so some of my songs sound a little bit like music theater.
Speaker 3Some of them are straight folk from the people that I was learning from. I love bluesy, jazzy songs. I used to sing a lot of those early 20th century Cole Porter and those are still some of my favorite songs to sing, and my style seems to be very frustrating to people when they review my music because they say she needs to choose a genre, and I think why choose a genre? I have this rich singing background and I also still enjoy covering other people's songs. I actually, for a recent concert in Nashville, one of my mentors, sally Barris, came over to watch me sing and perform and I sang one of her songs and she loved my cover, because I have a long history of interpreting other people's songs. I still love to exercise that muscle too, so that's interesting.
Speaker 2I think that's refreshing, though, to have a wide variety of styles on your albums, because I remember Carole King, yes, when she released Tapestry. Some of the songs were more like ballads, but I was a kid and I just fell in love with it, and there were similarities, but it wasn't a cookie cutter album.
Speaker 3That's a great observation, and you know I'm hugely affected by Tapestry.
Speaker 2I still have the album cover Of course it's a gorgeous album.
Speaker 3It's iconic.
Speaker 2Yeah well, the album's too scratched up to listen to. I do have a turntable, but it's a gorgeous album, it's iconic. Yeah well, the album's too scratched up to listen to. I do have a turntable, but it's too scratched. Well, you've evolved and you say you've had changes to your style and your approach. So how do you connect emotionally with a song, especially when you're performing live?
Speaker 3that's just one of the most critical pieces I think I've had to learn. You kind of put on a persona and people sniff that out in a heartbeat, because what they really want is to be moved, and you cannot move someone unless you are really absorbed in it emotionally. I think it's not surprising, in fact, that so many singers want to act and actors want to sing, because singing requires both. When I first started out, I was really trying to make the pretty sounds and it was not resonating with people, and I can remember just being so frustrated I was just like, as if it's not hard enough, you want me to get on stage and break my heart. You want every single piece of me. But that's exactly what's got to happen.
Speaker 2People are paying. They think they know what they should be receiving.
Speaker 3Well they do. There are some performers who get up there and they want it to all be about them, and I don't think they're as successful, because this isn't supposed to be your therapy session. The audience wants you to make them feel comfortable, and if you do anything that then makes the audience feel uncomfortable or feel like they have to now support you, then it's not as much fun for the audience. So I agonize over the set list as well as the order. How are you going to help them experience all these emotions? You can't stay too sad, or, whenever you've earned it that you can give them a sad song or two, I always feel like I have to earn it a little bit.
Speaker 2A getting to know you time. Yeah yeah, getting to know each other.
Speaker 3Yeah, they've got to trust you. You've got a song or two and they'll be like now we can relax, we can trust her with our heart, in a sense.
Speaker 2A song or two and they'll be like, okay, now we can relax, we can trust her with our heart, in a sense. When you said something a minute ago about actors wanting to be singers and singers wanting to be actors, do you think some of that is because, once you are able to have a certain level of confidence in one area, you have a lot more willingness to try something different? Good observation that may not be so. You know, a lot of people are just so full of themselves, but I wonder about that. You think, well, you know what, I'm pretty good and I'm going to try something new.
Speaker 3Yeah, I still think that trying something new is hard because you have to in a sense put that beginner mind on. I think it's really hard when you're incredibly accomplished to risk being a beginner again, because people can and might laugh at you, particularly if you don't totally hit it out of the ballpark. I think about somebody like Michael Jordan decided to do baseball for a while and he was in fact a good baseball player, but he wasn't an outstanding baseball player, so he kind of had to give that up. But I really admired him for giving that a shot.
Speaker 2I wonder if people, once they get to know somebody who has a certain amount of fame, they have a feeling where they want to stay attached to the performer as they are and really don't want to see them in a different light.
Speaker 3That's probably true and I think that's something of the frustration maybe with me changing genres. Particularly if someone is just listening to an album, I think I frustrate them because they want to have a category to put me in and if I'm constantly turning things up, that's unsettling and it's interesting because I think it works well in a gig, because it's actually quite successful for performing to have a whole lot of songs that sound so different. I think it is a little bit harder in this whole sense of branding. Part of branding is being able to say in maybe two or three sentences this kind of genre, this kind of story, so people have a way in. And I have resisted the brand and that is a little bit problematic for me. But my goals are not really to be a successful brand and I have chosen to do something different that is just creatively fulfilling but may not be as easily marketable and I understand that trade-off that I've made.
Speaker 2I see Okay, Katie, let's switch gears now and talk about your songwriting process. That's got to be very interesting.
Crafting Inspiration
Speaker 3You know it really is, because I had no idea I could write a song. So in many ways it's like discovering you can make a rabbit appear out of a hat and even talking to people who have been songwriters for decades. The whole creative process is a bit mysterious to everybody and I think there's a little bit of a fear, like even someone like Leonard Cohen who still fears maybe I don't have it anymore. He would obsessively edit his songs. So there's a sense that I answer. That question is you know, we have no idea where these songs come from. And it can start with a phrase you know the lyric or it can start with a tune. It can start with noodling on the guitar or the piano or whatever. There are multiple ways to get into that zone of writing a song. But what's so interesting? Sometimes you do everything you can and you can't get into it. But you know when you're there. Roseanne Cash talks about having a big net to catch a song and that some people have really huge nets and some of us just have small nets. But it's like the songs are out there and we try to catch them and that in some ways makes it sound like it's. It's easy, like you catch the thing whole and there's a whole lot of work involved, but that moment of inspiration does feel like a miracle every time. But specifically, there's some things that have been useful to me. I was an English major, so I probably do tend to start most of my songs with the concept or the words, and I've also found that I have to somehow find something for my critical mind to do so that it can let my creative mind experiment, because the first things that come out are not going to sound good and they're not. It's not going to flow right and you, if your critic gets in there dumping on this immediately, you're going to give up. So sometimes I'll song write while I'm driving because my critic is busy watching the traffic and figuring out what to do next and my creative side can kind of oh, let's play while she's busy. Or I'll go for a walk or setting a timer and giving yourself any kind of inspiration.
Speaker 3I was in a songwriter's group and I glanced at my neighbor's shoes and he had on brown shoes. So I said, okay, the prompt is brown shoes. And then we all had to write and you can't pick your pen up. You have to just keep writing and just let the thoughts tumble out and this whole story came out of my pen that I wasn't thinking about. You kind of think, where does this come from? But you give yourself the freedom and you write it all down and then you can go back and craft and put together the song. And I usually craft the lyrics first and then I love the music part. So I always have this gleeful moment when I've got the lyrics right and I kind of rub my hands together. It's like, oh goody, now we get to work on the music.
Speaker 1It's so funny.
Speaker 3So that's kind of my process in a nutshell.
Speaker 2I just interviewed somebody last week and they do writing workshops and they use prompts also. I think that it was really nice to hear you say that, because sometimes I thought, well, it just pops into their head, but that's really a structured way to do it.
Speaker 3I think it could be used in so many creative outlets when people want to be creative, to choose a prompt, and so true the hardest part about being creative is just starting and then to keep going when what you come up with is just awful, because what you first come up with is going to be awful and you've got to let yourself put some bad words and horrible phrases.
Speaker 3It's just going to be a little bit bad until you get those iterations going and then you learn and then you can craft, and I have been really lucky that I have really.
Speaker 3Quite early on, I mentioned my mentor and friend, sally Barris, who's a singer songwriter, and she was one of the very first people I ever took a songwriting workshop from and I ended up hosting her in my house for house concerts. We've been friends for about 14 years now. We've been friends for about 14 years now and especially during the pandemic, we did a lot of songwriting and Zoom sessions and so she's taught me so much about the craft of songwriting, because there certainly are ways to do it, and then, of course, you break the rules. But if you know the rules, then you can be like OK, I'm breaking this intentionally, and there are other people who never worry about even learning the rules, but that's the easiest way for me to learn the craft. I suppose there are a few songs that I wrote in one sitting, but in general you have to let the creative process flow, you have to learn how to make it better, and I think both of those pieces are important.
Speaker 2So you have just spoken a little bit about going to workshops and different methods you've use to learn your craft. What about collaborations? Have you done any work with other writers?
Navigating Critique and Personal Songwriting
Speaker 3I think it's critical if you are a creative, even if your craft has to be done by yourself, even if you decide you're going to write everything by yourself, it's critical to have a support group or mentors, and I've done all of the above. Early on, I started practicing with a friend and so really over these 14 years, I've always had someone that I practice with every week, and it's changed. I've had songwriting groups that I've started and that have come and gone Again. The workshops, the conferences, the mentors. You just need the support. You need other people to reflect back what you're doing. Sally has also. I've got some of the things she's told me, the ways that she's encouraged me. I've just saved in my phone so that I can pull them out, and when I get discouraged I'll look at some of what she's said to me in the past.
Speaker 3We all need some support because it is such a vulnerable thing. Maybe you're starting a business, so you think, well, I'm not a creative, I'm a businesswoman, but that is creative, I would argue, coming up with an idea that no one else has. And you're starting your own business and you're figuring out how to do so many different things, and so you need a support group or a mentor. I've written a couple of songs with other people, and particularly in workshops they make you write songs together. That process has never worked very easily for me, and so it's not something I've tended to try to seek out. But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate the collaborative process, and particularly once a song is finished, I like to collaborate with other artists about how I might perform it, because that's another whole step in the creative process.
Speaker 2Yeah, you talked about all forms of creativity and even starting a business, and when you recognize that we all look at things from different points of view, yes, accepting that is important.
Speaker 3And yeah, you're kind of touching a little bit on the very first songwriting workshops I ever did, where you play a song and then everybody critiques it. Oh, that is tough and sometimes there are people who are critiquing who are particularly good. So it takes a while to kind of learn. I need to listen to this person, not that person or this critique, not that one. But it always hurts a little bit. Well, actually, I take that back. It used to hurt, but now, for example, working with Sally with the song, I'll play a song for her and I have not the least amount of hurt if she says have you thought about adding a bridge or what about this? Or this line is not working. And now I'm just so curious I think, oh, oh, yeah, I see exactly what you're talking about and I have not a single problem with changing things.
Speaker 3Though I will say, another mentor, after he saw me perform a song, he kind of took it apart and he had all these suggestions for another verse and I didn't at all like what he was suggesting. So I took it to Sally and then we worked through what was useful about his critique and what was not useful and we did end up changing the song a little bit, but not in the way that he had suggested. So that's another whole skill, too, of learning how to take critique without your ego, but also you know to figure out who to listen to, who not to listen to, what pieces to listen to to, who not to listen to, what pieces to listen to and not to be so precious sometimes with your own. Because I can remember when I first started songwriting, someone might critique something and I would just. But that's not how it came to me.
Speaker 3But I finally learned that it actually really doesn't matter what that initial nugget of a kernel was. You might in the end abandon it because it's no longer serving the purpose that you want it to serve. So what's that expression? You have to kill your darlings sometimes. So that's one of the first things I think it's really important to learn. You gotta let that go.
Speaker 2I wonder if people in the creative process would consider critique as a prompt, because when you were talking about the guy that critiqued you and it prompted you to go to Sally and work through some things, oh, that's a great way, but not looking at it as a critique, but I don't have to do what this person said, but it does prompt me to think about it.
Speaker 3That's a beautiful way of putting that. I love that. I'm going to use that from now on as I talk to myself about it, because you're absolutely right, that is. The kernel of it is that someone is reacting to something in your song. It is that someone is reacting to something in your song, so something is not quite hitting right and they may have some idea about what it is, but you're the one who actually has to figure it out. It's almost like, if you think of it more of like a puzzle yeah, as you said, I love that. That prompts me to think about it some more. And what am I really trying to accomplish? And if it's not coming through, then what change should I make? Think about it some more. And what am I really trying to accomplish? And if it's not coming through, then what change should I make?
Speaker 2Well, I think about back when I used to lead meetings at work and we were a marketing department and supposed to be a friendly place where everybody could put things on the table because we were creative. But I remember we had one person in the department which I loved dearly. She meant nothing by it, but she would say to someone a better way to do that might be. So I took her aside and I said you know, it's making people feel uncomfortable because they're scared to say something. So I want you to start saying have you thought about this, or might you consider this? Whatever, but never use the word better. And that worked out well.
Speaker 3What a great way to mentor somebody, because I think when you're the person doing the critiquing, you feel like you're introducing it in a gentle way. But you're right, and what a great tip to just take out the better. Just ask a question. That's lovely, what a great mentor?
Speaker 2you were, I tried. So which of your songs is most personal to you, and why?
Speaker 3I mean? The obvious answer is they all have some amount of personal connection. For me, otherwise they would be pretty boring to perform. But what immediately jumps to mind off of this most recent album, the lead-off song Reason Enough, is very personal.
Speaker 3I had stopped writing songs for about a year and a half and it was my friend, sally, who got me writing songs again. She said it's been too long and you need to get back in there. I had just gotten discouraged. I got in my head too much. I just felt like maybe I couldn't do this. And so she gave me a prompt.
Speaker 3She played me that Kate Wolfe song, across the Great Divide, and she said choose a metaphor from nature and write a song about how you're feeling right now. And because I was feeling like I didn't really have a reason to keep writing or keep performing, I wrote about that in a sense almost existential despair, and I used the metaphor of a bird that made a nest right outside of my practice room window and that bird would sit on the eggs and sometimes I could swear she was singing along with me, particularly in those early days when I was trying to learn the guitar and that bird would just be sitting there singing and I just found such comfort in that. So I use that metaphor of a bird and of how nature is comforting to me when I start to feel so isolated and alone and it connects me again. And then in that third verse I talk about an experience of estrangement with an uncle and an aunt, and the uncle had actually died of COVID recently, so I was a little bit distraught about that and that was some of what was underpinning all of those emotions. So that song is very personal and, interestingly, people are really playing that song a lot.
Speaker 3I can kind of see, you know, either through YouTube or through streaming. There are ways to track all of that and there are others. When Dragons Were Real is another deeply personal song. I wrote that about the experience of having my son go off to college and that was a song that I kept taking back to songwriting groups and they kept saying this is not working, what are you trying to say? And I was saying, oh, I want my son to go off and do his own thing. And that actually wasn't at all what I was trying to say and that's why the song wasn't working and I finally realized, after enough of those critiques, that what I wanted for my children was for them to hold on to the magic of childhood and not to abandon that childhood self that I remembered and that they didn't remember anymore, and so that song is deeply personal and deeply meaningful to me.
Speaker 2I'm sure you love all of them.
Speaker 3I do.
Speaker 2They're like your babies.
Speaker 3They are. The Wrong Place is a breakup song, but actually what really happened was I genuinely did drive in the wrong direction. For three hours my head was so befuddled from my relationship with my future husband. Getting serious, there's another song that I have on YouTube that I got to sing at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, which is a really big stage with a thousand people. I got to sing at the Knight Theater in Charlotte, which is a really big stage with a thousand people, and I got to tell the origin story of that song and then sing it along with one of a guy who's produced my albums for years, chris Rosser. And that's about that estrangement that we sometimes feel with people that we love so much, and that moment when you're trying to connect, and so the metaphor or the line is tell me something true, tell me something that just really moves your heart and share something with me. That's deeply personal, because I'm feeling estranged from you.
Speaker 2So, yeah, yeah, my heart's strained right now. How many albums have you released released?
Speaker 3I know you just released one yeah, I'm gonna have to count one, two, three, four, five, and actually two of them are covers. I mentioned going over home. There are no original songs on that, and that one's kind of a nod to how I first started and my mentor, sai Khan. I covered a full album of his songs during the pandemic and then there's one called Something True. In fact the six songs are originals and then those same six songs are re-recorded on a full CD called Play Me. So really there are two full CDs of original songs and the other three are either covers or redos of the same song.
Speaker 2Very nice. Can you share with us an experience or a performance that was particularly memorable or significant to you?
Embracing Individuality in Music Industry
Speaker 3Yeah, when I was in high school, as I mentioned, I did a lot of music theater performing, and my senior year was a vehicle kind of for me, but it didn't really show the range of my voice and my theater director realized he wasn't going to have a vehicle for me, so he asked me to do a one show, and I had. I talked to him about this many years later, decades later, he said he'd never asked anyone to do that before and he never did again in his career. And what's so funny and I do think that this is part of being young I just immediately said, yes, you know, that was back in the day when there were shows on TV that were variety shows, so I used to love watching all of those and I knew exactly how I would put it together. And so, you know, I had all kinds of collaborations. I knew the piano player I wanted to play, I knew what songs I wanted to do.
Speaker 3I got one teacher to play the banjo and I used to love puppets. So I sang with Kermit and I stuck my hand in the piano and I had done enough puppeteering that I could sing the song and look away from the puppet and make the puppet. Look at me, look at the audience do its own thing. I had people afterwards go how did you do that? That's so much fun. It was so fun, yeah. And then recently I did a tour up to Chicago and I really haven't done much touring and I took my bass player and my percussionist and we worked so hard. We'd had so many rehearsals and we just really were in the zone and we got to do a radio show called the Midnight Special at WFMT and there was a wonderful audience, the sound was great and that felt like just a really special moment as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2If you were to give some advice to some aspiring songwriters and musicians and singers, what would you say to them about trying to find their own unique voice?
Speaker 3First of all, I'm not really sure I'd want to give advice. Probably a more helpful thing would be to ask questions rather than give advice, because their experience is going to be entirely different from mine. The music industry has changed so dramatically. I've been songwriting since about 2010 and it's almost a bewildering world to figure out. I went to see a new young artist who's just killing it and doing so great, and I remember talking to him about starting out, and I think none of what I said about my journey has been applicable for him, because it's just a different world and he's young and he's also doing something completely different.
Speaker 3So, if anything, I would mostly just encourage them to just start, to just try. You know, find collaborators who can support and encourage you and don't give up. Keep trying if you feel like you're making mistakes that probably means you're learning a lot and just do the next thing that makes sense. You can't possibly figure out the whole thing at once, so you have to just start and do the next thing that makes sense. And then, what do I need to learn? Okay, well then, how can I learn that? And it's just that constant self-questioning to learn about or remove that barrier somehow. So probably any of my advice would be very generic like that because, especially someone who's young and starting out, they're going to teach me to be honest.
Speaker 2Well, we're about to close, but I want to say that advice you could give to others, because you're doing this yourself is be yourself.
Speaker 3Oh, I love it.
Speaker 2Yeah, be yourself because you are doing your own style of music. You're creating in your own way and, instead of trying to mimic everybody else, be yourself.
Speaker 3You are so insightful, janice, this has been so fun, all of your questions. And I can't believe you said that because when I was starting out, before I'd really even written songs, I had this friend that I was collaborating with. She was wanting to get her creative fiction out and she gave me a t-shirt that said Be you. And that was exactly the piece of advice and kind of that validation that I needed at that point. And I also said that to my daughter in our exchange as she goes on her journey. And I also said that to my daughter in our exchange as she goes on her journey and I was trying to give her that message of I don't know the world that she's creating in and what she's doing, but she does and she needs to keep being herself in it.
Speaker 2Perhaps she could do a BU tour. Yeah, being you tour, and I am who I am.
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah, and isn't that wonderful. And not to get caught up in jealousy about other people or oh, I wish I could be someone else, or any of that. So, thank goodness, we each have our own little journeys, yeah.
Speaker 2Well, as we wind up our conversation today, I want to invite the listeners to visit your website, and that's Katie Oates and it's O-A-T-E-S dot com.
Speaker 3Katie Oates dot com. K-a-t-i-e. It's all about the E's.
Speaker 2K-A-T-I-E-O-A-T-E-S dot com, where they can find information about your just released fifth album, which is Edge of a Hurricane Correct fifth album, which is Edge of a Hurricane correct, yeah. And the website also provides information about how you can schedule Katie to perform in your area for both large and small events, and you're based out of North Carolina.
Speaker 3I am out of Asheville.
Speaker 2Asheville okay, what a creative area.
Speaker 3Oh, I love it.
Remembering Magic in Songwriting
Speaker 2It's just beautiful yeah. Also, please remember to visit our Restless to Renewed website for more information about all of our guests. There you will find links to their websites and much more, and, in addition, we hope you will follow this podcast, tell your friends and follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Thank you again, katie, and we're going to close today with your song when Dragons Were Real.
Speaker 1We were knights in armor of shining steel, fearless in battle on our noble steeds. And when you scraped your knee or got scared in the night, you would run to me and I'd make it all right. Yes, I could be brave If you could believe Back when unicorns danced and dragons were real. Now my armor's rusted and paint's begun to peel. There are bills to be paid and deadlines to meet.
Speaker 1Words are our weapons. We hurl in the abyss Wounds from wars don't heal with a kiss. And you don't believe. You don't even recall. Don't believe. You don't even recall Back when unicorns danced and dragons were real. So close your eyes, just close your eyes, just close your eyes. Wish on a star. Don't let this hard world break your heart in two, cause magic still lives in you. Maybe one fine day we'll be heroes again, standing proud and true on our own homeland. We will chase away monsters from under the bed, find happy ever after in the lives we have led and we will believe. We will believe and we will recall Back when unicorns danced and dragons were real. So close your eyes, just close your eyes. Wish on a star. Don't let this hard world break your heart in two, because magic still lives in you, in you.
Speaker 2That was lovely.
