Katy Moffatt

(Q)-Please state your name and place of birth.
Katy Moffatt- Katy Moffatt. I was born in Fort Worth,Texas.

(Q)-Within the music on your new disc, “Up Close and Personal”, you seem rather adept at expressing the lonesome moments in life. Why?

Katy Moffatt- These are emotionally what strikes me as relevant to the process of life that we all go through. At times yes, I will be struck very hard by and attracted to a well-expressed moment, of the aloneness that we all live in.

(Q)-Why do you believe your audience embraces your music as the audience does during the listening experience within your new disc, “Up Close and Personal”,?

Katy Moffatt- I don’t know. I am glad that I have an audience. I am very grateful that there is a connection. I learn so much when I perform and then I talk to members of the audience after the performance. I have learned an awful lot. One example of this is a song called, “Midnight Radio”. It was not until I began performing that song, that I began to hear people, after the show, tell me, “Oh my gosh, that song describes exactly what I used to do”. So, I think there are many ways that the audience I have, thank goodness, actually connects with my material and with the songs both in experience and emotionally. What I have learned when I am performing and then afterwards when I am speaking to an audience, has proved to be very important to me.

(Q)-Do you play the role of a reporter in your songwriting in that,you are in some cases, just writing what you see and observe in your daily walk of life?

Katy Moffatt- Actually yes. I actually am very interested in being the reliable witness. That is one thing that I have admired so much throughout my entire life in music and I have been attracted to. When a songwriter is a truly reliable witness and their expression, however it is made, is so incredible that it just gets to the truth, that is important to me. Sometimes you are able to get straight to it. Sometimes it takes a lot of tearing. Sometimes it takes a lot of chipping away, a lot of hammering. One such song on, “Up Close and Personal”, called, “Never Be Alone Again”, is really just straight reportage. I am really just trying to tell the truth that I know about on a particular subject without coloring it, without a pro or con issue in any way.

(Q)-What is the songwriting process like for you?

Katy Moffatt- The songwriting process for me after all of the years is still very mysterious. I have engaged in it and been engaged by it in many different ways in an almost instantaneous, cathartic expression, that seemed more like channeling than songwriting. From that form of personal expression, to the inevitable hammering that all writers go through of just working on a piece until it is ringing truth, both lyrically and musically. So there’s many, many different approaches which have been successful for me. So, I have to say that the songwriting process remains mysterious.

(Q)-Why do you think you desire attention in the sharing of such personal songs with an audience?

Katy Moffatt- To me, it’s not so much as the desire of attention, it is more of the very strong need I have to communicate. Performing is an interactive experience for me. I realize that it’s not for many performers, but I really have a strong need to engage the audience and to hear their feedback too. During a part of my performance, there will often be, almost without exception, a time when I will ask for requests.

(Q)-Always?
Katy Moffatt- Yes. Unless I’m opening for a huge act and playing to someone else’s audience.

(Q)-Why?
Katy Moffatt- I love hearing what the audience has to say and I talk to them and they talk to me. It’s interactive. It’s about a need to communicate.