Katie Bejsiuk is free of pseudonyms. Good for her. It’s time to embrace who you are and drop any pretense. You can listen to Katie sans pretense below in the following track “Olive, NY.”
Katie Bejsiuk (fka Free Cake For Every Creature) shares “Olive, NY” the stunning new single from her upcoming debut album, The Woman on the Moon, out June 24th on Double Double Whammy. The FADER, who premiered the track today, called it a “hushed yet gently crushing new song.”
“Olive, NY” feels like a companion song to the album’s lead single “Onion Grass,” a song inspired by the rupture of a childhood friendship in which an idyllic natural setting is the only thing sustaining the relationship. “Olive, NY” flips that story; as an adult, the setting causes strain. “In 2019 my partner and I moved from West Philly to upstate New York, partly with the intention to buy a cute little house and live out a pastoral fantasy. At the time, it was still possible to buy cheap property, but by the time we’d saved enough money, the pandemic had hit and housing prices had practically doubled. The song expresses my frustration with our process of trying to buy a house & also with the barriers to entry to ‘The American Dream,’” KatieBejsiuk explains.
The song is carried by two notes plucked on a single guitar string and Katie’s rhythmic, often spilling and breathy vocals, accompanied by Jon Samuels (Friendship, 2nd Grade), that emphasize the confusion of figuring out the next move.The outro cuts the single-note progression and adds swelling violins and piano, an audible and unattainable dream of endless landscape and sky.
The name Bejsiuk is the singer-songwriter’s original surname: her father, a first generation American with parents from Ukraine, changed it before she was born. By reclaiming the name for her solo project, the first new music we’ve heard from Katie since Free Cake disbanded in 2019, she has conjoined with a shadow version of herself who holds hands with her past, present, and future. And with the release of her debut album listeners are offered the most wholly version of Katie yet.
