Katy Steele Reimagines Her Musical Legacy
After getting Little Birdy back together for an anniversary tour in 2025, singer-songwriter Katy Steele is heading out solo this year. With a new EP on the horizon, Steele opened up to The Note about her upcoming release, living in New York during her twenties and juggling motherhood with a music career.
Words Emily Wilson // Image supplied
Katy Steele trades in versatility.
“I feel like I have a lot of different personalities,” the singer-songwriter says over a Zoom call where she displays a bold aesthetic of cat-eyeliner, bright magenta lipstick, lime green fingernails, a broad newsboy cap and heavy, mismatched silver earrings.
Steele, who launched a successful solo career in 2010 after enjoying her first taste of the limelight as the frontperson and guitarist of the alternative-rock outfit Little Birdy, is a veteran of the music industry - its highs, its lows, its confusions, its devastation and its triumphs. Her upcoming EP, Undressed, which is slated for an April release, makes her level of experience and wisdom more evident than ever before, raw and emotionally unfiltered as it is.
She will be heading out on a national tour bearing the same name across April and May. The intimate, stripped-back show will reimagine Little Birdy hits such as ‘Beautiful To Me’, include new solo material, and meticulously reinterpret covers such as Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ and Patti Smith’s ‘Because The Night.’
“I guess that’s where the title comes from, that whole concept of undressing it,” Steele says. “I was actually awake last night thinking about it, still forming the show in my head. When it’s stripped back like that, you can be spontaneous if you want to.”
Part of Steele’s plan to keep the show “interesting” is to have multiple different instruments onstage. “It’s just going to be me and one other player, and we’ll swap between instruments. I want to have a lot going on, but also not have a lot going on, if you know what I mean.”
The seedling of Undressed came to her last year when she was traversing her way through a turbulent time.
“My dad had just died and there was some stuff going on in my personal life.” Her publisher, Sony Music, suggested recording stripped-back versions of her own songs. “And I thought, why not? So I jumped in the studio, and in one day, I did nine songs. That is the basis of this record, that one day.”
Undressed comes from craving simplicity and craving presentness in the moment. “I've always wanted to do something with no frills. Everything you hear now is just so produced. It’s so easy now to just put a million layers of guitar and add synths. There’s just something nice about not thinking about it too much. I’ve always loved playing solo, because it is really, really scary and there’s something exciting that comes with that as well. With this sense of unknown.”
Revising the Little Birdy tracks - the songs that essentially jumpstarted her career - has been an “awesome” experience.
“It’s really nice. To hear those songs in a different way, it just makes me very proud of what we did as a band. I dig it. They were all just written from a really pure place.”
Selecting covers for the EP came entirely from gut instinct. It was, however, extremely hard for her to narrow down her options, hence why Steele is referring to this particular EP as “Volume One”, indicating the possibility of further volumes on the way. “I’m trying to keep it a bit open, a bit like a Netflix show where it ends on a cliffhanger,” she laughs.
Songs such as ‘Perfect Day’ are so iconic and beloved - on that note, is she worried about how these covers will be perceived as measuring up to the originals?
She lifts her hands, palms up, and shakes her head. “I can’t think about that because it’s just too stressful.”
She adds, “I’m getting older, we’re all getting older, and sometimes you just have to go for it and you can’t think about what anybody is thinking, because you’ll never do anything. And I’ve spent years doing that. When I came back from America, I spent years being too scared to release my own music. And I’m kind of past that now. I just want to have lots of artistic output and move on and keep making new things. That’s the way it should be, I think.”
Steele moved to New York City alone in 2010, in her late twenties.
“It was a really big learning curve for me as a person,” she says. “I kind of thought that if I moved to New York, I would meet all these people who had their lives figured out, but I just felt like a lot of people were living there to find themselves. I guess I was too.”
The experience was significant for her, but far from easy. “You know, it’s New York, it’s a very fast-paced world, it’s very cliquey. It was just a very full-on period of my life. I didn’t have much of a support network there. I had a boyfriend I met there, but I didn’t have a band. I had a couple of friends who were in the industry. It was very spacious. I guess it was kind of a lonely time. I wish it was different, but that’s just what happened, you know.”
After five or six years spent in New York, she came back to Australia on the advice of her brother Luke. Three or four months later, she met her husband. “The rest is history. We’ve been together since then.” They moved to Melbourne, then to New Zealand, but have been in Perth ever since they found out Steele was pregnant with their first child. “The lifestyle here is phenomenal. In terms of my mental health, it’s a great place for me to be.”
Currently, she is juggling raising two small kids (one is three and a half, one is seven and a half) and working on her next solo album.
“I really want it to be about growth as a woman and everything you go through as a human getting older,” she explains of the project. “And in some ways it feels pretty similar to where some of the Little Birdy stuff started, which was about growing up and finding yourself.”
Making time for both motherhood and artistry is, she says, “really, really, really” difficult.
“It’s a lot of stressful days trying to cram everything in. And when you’re independent, you basically do everything yourself. It’s a real slog for musicians these days, for everybody…It’s just so fragmented. We’ve all just got to support each other if we can. I just want to keep making music, but I also want to be able to pay my bills and live a satisfactory life.”
She sighs. “It’s a lot, you know.” She points to the fact that this will be her first tour where she will be putting together an East Coast band rather than bringing her Perth band with her, because the flights are simply too expensive.
The expectation to have a constant social media presence is, for her, another difficulty.
“I don’t particularly like being in front of the camera. I don’t particularly like filming myself and doing the whole TikTok thing. It doesn’t feel natural to me. And I feel like there are millions of artists who feel the same way.”
The proliferation of social media, the expectation for artists to be open with their audiences about everything, has, she believes, led to a loss of the art of mystique. “The art of leaving a little bit to the imagination is completely gone, and I think that’s a sad thing.” She mentions Lorde’s stratospheric breakthrough into the industry as a teenager. “Her whole concept was like, who is this artist? There was one photo, she had the song, and there was all this mystique around who she was as an artist, and I just feel like you can’t do that anymore.”
There is, however, still much to celebrate. “Music is so genre-less now. You can be a cross between pop and funk and soul - that’s what’s exciting about music now. You can be fifteen years old and create this sound that no one’s heard of before.”
She references Steve Lacy, and the groundbreaking way he recorded songs simply through his phone at the start of his career. “People are experimenting, and that’s great, that’s exciting. There’s some great music getting made, there really is.”
The mood then takes a downward turn at the mention of Spotify’s “Prompted Playlists”, recently promoted by ex-triple J presenter and social media personality Ash McGregor, which rely entirely on AI curation.
“I’m not a fan,” Steele says curtly.
Expanding to a discussion of artificial intelligence in general, she says, “I think there’s a place for it on the backend. If it helps make artists’ lives easier, then that’s great.” Perhaps, for example, it has a place in admin, she suggests.
“But when it comes to the creative side of things, I really don’t agree with it. What it produces is so generic, because it’s a fucking robot for fuck’s sake.”
At the end of the day, when it comes to music and art, Katy Steele will continue to prioritise humanity. “It’s good to keep things organic, because if anything, that’s what’s going to be lacking soon: that organic humanness that they’re trying to steal away.”
Undressed is set for release this May. Catch Katy Steele performing at Lion Arts Factory on Thursday 30 April. Tickets on sale at katysteele.com.
