Kathy’s Music

The greatest songwriters are seldom songwriters alone. Some are creative polymaths while others synthesize elements from an array of forms into a wider songwriting vision. Kathy Muir is more than a songwriter.” Jason Hillenberg, Music Emissions

Background

Soulful balladeer Kathy Muir conjures enlightened songs that paint vivid landscapes of her journey as she transforms elements of pop and folk into brand-new sounds. Her warm voice glides through lyrics that unfold like the words of an inviting diary.

Muir’s fine-tuned skills as a songwriter and a photographer as well as her willingness to share personal perspectives and bold emotions enrich her intimate, multidisciplinary approach to her art. Muir’s frequent collaborations with artists across media have allowed her to continuously evolve her work while extending the boundaries of singer/songwriter material into unexpected realms.

Where Art Meets Music

The possibilities presented by humanity’s creative canvas have always fascinated Muir. She has dedicated herself to unearthing the rich spaces where visual art, music, and poetry meet. Muir’s roots in spiritual songs have remained with her as she voyaged beyond Scotland, to France and ultimately Stamford, CT, where she now resides. Along the way, she has found her own inner voice as a songwriter and an organic approach that is inspired as much by her personal experiences as it is by her own boundless energy and pure imagination. The melodies flow through her, and she ties them together with delicate threads of chords and lyrics.

Collaborations

A prolific and fastidious creator, Muir has released many musical and multi-media projects during her career. Many have been collaborations with other artists. One project of note was “Sweet and Easy”, a song inspired by her love of John Muir and the pictorial style of The Seattle Camera Club (1924-1929). Muir also worked with high school photography students on her song “Keep on Walking” about the issue of homelessness in Miami; the video for the song featured arresting photographs they had taken of the homeless population in Miami.

Muir’s single “Seattle Mornin” explored the evolution of relationships and offered up lyrics inspired by Pablo Picasso’s sense of surrealism and abstraction. One of Muir’s most recent project for her single “Like Warriors” was a community video made using photographs from the 1960s and 1970s provided by her neighbours in Edinburgh. More recently Pocketful of Sand was released (May 2017) in collaboration with an Instagram sketch artist.

Releases

Scottish-born Muir has released three albums. In 2017 she released lo-fi EP 2+2=4, more indie-led than her previous, acoustic-folk offerings. She spent most of 2018/19 working on eight songs to complete the ‘Double Take Series’ and four singles. If I Can Breathe was the first in the series to be released. She then released single Shadow.

With the arrival of COVID, Muir took a hiatus, putting on hold the Double Take Series and recording in her Connecticut recording studio.

Stop Walk Talk, released on 17 December 2021 is the beginning of Muir’s journey back to releasing her work.

Kathy’s Photography

Kathy likes to be in front of an audience. What she is less well known for is her work behind a camera lens. Her first memory of owning a camera was from collecting comic-strip wrappers found inside Bazooka Joe chewing gum. “I had to collect a lot of Bazooka comics to send off for the ‘FREE! REAL CAMERA’. It was a magical moment.

Today she uses a Canon 5D MkII and her trusty iPhone. She can be found taking photos in her favourite cities Edinburgh, Paris, London and New York, or of the things she knows best: motorcycles, natural landscapes, railways stations and her fellow musicians.

Kathy is interested in the history of photography, with a particular penchant for 1920’s pictorial photography as seen through the lens of the Seattle Camera Club. Determined to raise awareness of, and to help preserve the work of these photographers, she collaborated with the University of Washington to create www.seattlecameraclub.com.

“Photography is such a personal choice and it’s true what they say, namely that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, two people may look at the same object but see completely different things. There is a real buzz when you know you’ve truly captured a moment because, long after the photo has been taken, there remains an energy to the photograph before you. That’s how I feel about the work of the Seattle Camera Club and is what I aspire to possess in my own work. I try to imagine that if I were the viewer, would I want to look at a photograph time after time. It’s this measure that helps guide me in my work”.

Why Square Photos?

Here is a photography blog I posted which explains in more detail why I enjoy the challenge of shooting square photos

Why Metal Prints?

I like printing my photos using the same dimensions of a record album – let’s face it, some of the most iconic artwork was found on album covers.  Printing on metal adds a further visual experience, where the image appears more detailed, more defined thanks to it being captured on this bright, vivid texture.

Have a look at Kathy’s photographic work.

black and white metal photography

Paris. Black and White metal print

One thought on “About

  1. Of course I’ve subscribed…. I may not attend many of your Iive gigs, but you and your music reside in my heart….

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