“I’ll probably open a mescal bar. Or make instrumental music for Arby’s commercials.”

An Interview with Katy Davidson

Katy D is the singer songwriter from Portland, OR behind such projects as Dear Nora, Key Losers, and Lloyd and Michael. Occasionally she is a touring member of Gossip and Yacht. I recently had the chance to speak with her over the Internet and asked her thoughts on music, Arby’s, visual aesthetics, and the global debt crisis.

—Christian Filardo

THE BELIEVER: The idea of travel has always been so present in your music. Can you reflect on moving/travelling and how it has impacted your life and artistic/aesthetic choices?

KATY D: Yeah, freeways, rental cars, airplanes all keep popping up in my lyrics, and they have for years. I’m obsessed with travel. It’s something we all do, all the time. Why the hell do we move around so much? The restlessness is comically exhausting. Though the act of it can be likened to existing in a vacuum. We get in some kind of metal tube that takes us from point A to point B, and spatial and temporal concepts become suspended. We listen to music, we have conversations, we zone out, we zone in, but we can’t really do much else in the moment except for travel. In fact, we don’t even travel, we just sit while a metal tube travels us. Appropriately, the physical act of traveling can be quite dreamlike. I remember once having a nightmare about being in a plane crash…while on a plane. Also, I guess I’m obsessed with travel because it’s so fundamentally human. From early human migration across the Bering Straight 20,000 years ago, to Joni Mitchell traveling across the US in the 1970s, composing the album Hejira—we are born to travel. Travel is life. And yet travel inhibits life—our largest living organism, Earth, is choking on cumulative toxic exhaust from our contemporary forms of transportation. It’s a conundrum.

BLVR: I guess the idea of “home” really makes most travel pretty cyclical. That for the most part you go somewhere with the intention of returning. I imagine that your house is very in tune with your interest in travel. Could you tell us about the place where you live and some items or memories that reflect your journey through existence?

KD: I live in a beautiful house in north Portland that my friend owns. I have a nice bedroom and a music studio here. It’s probably the nicest place I’ve ever lived in my entire life. I’ve been working on making my space feel less like it belongs to a touring musician and more like a comfortable “adult” home—not like Pottery Barn-ed out or anything, but let’s just say I have a bed frame now. I don’t really care about stuff, and...