Play The Shitty Hits: Katie Von Schleicher's Ambitious Twist On Pop's Best Moves

Photo: Chris Baker

You always feel a great pop song before you understand it. There’s a disconnect between a chorus that makes your heart swell, or a turn of phrase that makes tears well in your eyes, and the meticulous, sometimes sterile, process that helps transport a writer’s thoughts from the page to your turntable/phone/whatever. But Katie Von Schleicher finds magic on both sides of the equation.

‘Shitty Hits’, her second release and her first card-carrying album, is a kaleidoscopic look at the artistic relationship between songwriting and recording. Self-produced and committed to tape between her parents’ Maryland home and her Brooklyn apartment, it’s one to delight and confound pop purists.

At times it cribs from shut-in LPs like Paul McCartney’s solo bow, at others it tips its hat to the adventurous streak at the heart of ‘Nilsson Sings Newman’ and the Carly Simon method, where total honesty is buttressed by technical precision.

Crucially, though, Von Schleicher always finds a way to rough up the edges of her often classically beautiful melodies. Her pop-literate approach extends only as far as understanding the blueprints: from there on she builds something that suits her imagination. In her words, it’s more finger painting than paint-by-numbers.

“Sometimes I try to write songs that someone has already written,” she says, picking up the phone mid-morning in New York. “I try to write my favourite song. I haven’t done this yet, but Big Star’s Big Black Car...someday I intend to just sit down and write that song. And I won’t. It’s mostly that I’m trying to create the way it makes me feel.

“It’s an emotional place that it’s coming from. I do hear stuff in my head, but when I imagine writing a song I’m feeling it in my chest. It feels like a physical sensation that you want to elicit. All of the audio rules that I play by afterwards are dictated by that.”

On Midsummer, the album’s second song, Von Schleicher drops us face first into a chorus that might interest Randy Newman. It’s a lovely time and one of many moments where her versatile voice hoists a clutch of clever hooks above the layered instrumentation. But then things start to change. You notice the way its background guitar notes whirr and distort. Then the words start to sink in: “Oh, I know that it’s wrong.”

‘Shitty Hits’ is a treasure trove for those who listened intently to the melodic feints that allowed Abba to transpose brutal words into lamé-plated disco standards. Its canvas is maximalist and richly detailed, but everything is carried off with subtlety and finesse.

Much of that comes from Von Schleicher’s treating the recording process as a creative endeavour, rather than an exercise in making sure everything fits together perfectly. If she hadn’t scrapped plans to work with an outside producer in a more straightforward studio setting, the record wouldn’t look like this. Its tangents are vital.

“I’m not sure what it is that I’m trying to capture about Randy Newman,” Von Schleicher says. “He’s a perfect example of someone I don’t want to sound like, whose lyrics I don’t necessarily want to emulate, except the fact that, on a song like Marie, he talks about how deeply he loves someone and you really feel it. And then he talks about what a shit he is and you also feel that. Midsummer’s a bit of that. When I was working on that song I was really confused.

“That was the one I felt the most lost when I started recording and the one that had the most miracles while recording. I wrote it and recorded it onto a voice memo and then I never played it. So when I engineered it there was some magic that happened there, just from leaving it open, leaving it empty. Some happy considerations happened. As soon as I’m in the recording process and not precious about something, that shapes it just as much.”

In the last few weeks, Von Schleicher has been getting used to speaking about her music publicly. ‘Bleaksploitation’, her first cassette release through Ba Da Bing, passed with fond words but little coverage. ‘Shitty Hits’ is different: people already want to know more. Like the gap between writing and recording she’s found sitting down for interviews to be a chance to reappraise her work and plot what might come next.

As ‘Shitty Hits’ isn’t out yet, it’s perhaps a bit premature to discuss album two. But another of this record’s fun aspects is the manner in which it hints at other possibilities. Choices have been made here - the mechanical crunch beneath Nothing, the low key ‘Dusty in Memphis’ drama of Soon - that suggest a number of different avenues Von Schleicher might wander down in future. Like her recent tourmate Aldous Harding, or artists like Torres, St. Vincent, even Lorde, there’s a sense that reinvention could be a killer ace up her sleeve along the way.

“I’m learning stuff about my own process through having to verbalise it,” she says. “I’m figuring it out now as much as any other time. From an emotional standpoint I didn’t know I could pull it off. I knew I could pull off a four track recording in a room on a cassette machine, sounding very lo-fi.

"For the next record I will be ambitious and challenge myself. I find that challenging myself in a concrete way, with a goal in mind, or parameters, is really helpful. I’m trying to envisage those parameters at the moment. I want to progress as an engineer and in production and I also want to progress as a songwriter. There has to be some kind of goal in mind.”

Lyrically, ‘Shitty Hits’ also lends itself to being a section of a wider patchwork. It’s a capsule from the last 18 months in Von Schleicher’s world and, like the production choices, totally her own. It’s largely concerned with perspective and self-examination, but she also takes a closer look at some indelible feelings.

At certain moments it’s like she’s taking them out of a box for the first time to get a good eyeful of them, because they aren’t going away. In that sense it’s handy that she has made postcards to accompany the record, because this is one from a very specific point in her life.

“I am fresh onto a path I feel good about,” she says. “I feel good about ‘Bleaksploitation’, but I don’t know if I’m going to listen to it any time soon. I feel really good about this record. [It's] very time and place and emotionally situated.

"They are, for better or worse, completely something of my mind. Sometimes I have a tendency to look back and be self-critical, but as long as I’m on this progression that feels, not authentic or something like that, but really ingrained in who I am, maybe I’ll have a nice perspective on it later. Maybe it’ll be a roadmap.”

‘Shitty Hits’ is out July 28 on Ba Da Bing/Full Time Hobby.

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