Welcome to the inaugural edition of Worst Song here at Yellow Green Red. I had the dubious idea of a short interview series wherein I ask artists I admire about the worst song they ever wrote (in their personal opinion), with the caveat that it has to have been recorded and released. What’s the fun if we can’t hear it?? Katie Alice Greer is an appropriately bold artist to kick things off, though honestly her song isn’t bad at all, even if I get where she’s coming from. Katie sang (and rotated through other instruments) in the DC punk band Priests before moving to Los Angeles and cutting out on her own, releasing the excellent debut Barbarism on FourFour Records in 2022. Coincidentally, her follow-up, Perfect Woman Sound Machine, Vol. 1, came out last week on her own GAK Records imprint. Her worst song can be found here if you’d like to listen along.

KAG: I think there are lots of bad songs in my overall catalogue; I’m not saying this to be self-deprecating but more because I tend to aim for making stuff that feels (for me) like I’m taking a big swing creatively, ideas where I’m not sure I can pull it off. For instance, Priests covered a song from one of our favorite tour van albums, “Mother” by Danzig. I was listening to a lot of Nile Rodgers projects at the time and wondering, could we make a disco version of “Mother”? Reader, I revisited this track a few months ago and regret to inform you we could not. However! I don’t think this is my worst song. I also don’t think the outtakes from my first solo album that got released a few years ago are my worst songs, even though I’d be so happy to get some of those off the internet. Many are unlistenable! But, I think especially in this day and age of inoffensive, safe, often boring music being made to fill playlists, it’s important to keep being a freak and making weird stuff that might not work. It’s important to record in strange ways and make stuff that makes some people wanna turn it off. There’s nothing wrong with pleasant or forgettable music, but it takes all kinds. To me, maybe my worst song is an old Priests track called “Lillian Hellman”. I just think it’s a little lyrically uninspired. I’d literally read a book about Lillian Hellman (an actual line in the song) and wanted to do her justice and I don’t think I did. It’s not shockingly bad or anything and my bandmates contributed perfectly fine stuff. I just think what I did there was filler, probably the worst creative offense.

YGR: That’s probably one of my biggest fears: not to make bad music, but mediocre music. I can see how learning about Lillian Hellman could inspire a song, though. You’ve always integrated real people, real historical events into your work… how do you approach that?

KAG: I think for me it’s almost a question of how to not do that. Some artists seem most comfortable writing directly about their own experiences and emotions; that’s much harder for me. My own experiences and feelings are fluid, they’re harder to grasp how I permanently feel about them. It’s not that I’m ignoring my feelings or experiences, I’m just not usually creatively excited by them. Whereas a good story, whether current or from the past, that’s riveting stuff! I want to try to hone in on what about it has captured my attention or feelings. Again, that’s just for me. I love stuff other people write about their own life. Joni Mitchell is one of my favorites. You seem really good at that too actually, though I guess I assume a lot of your lyrics are about real life, maybe they aren’t. Maybe everybody is writing about a character, even when they’re writing about themselves — and maybe everybody is writing about themselves even when they’re making up characters or telling stories?

YGR: How much did you contribute to the music with Priests, the stuff that wasn’t lyrics and singing?

KAG: I don’t love breaking down the contributions in that band because we split all the songwriting credits four ways on purpose (or three when it made sense to). Being like “that part was mine, that part was theirs” doesn’t feel like the spirit of the band, which was also the really frustrating part of it sometimes, too. But there were times I was humming a riff or suggesting a rhythm idea. It’d be hard to only ever write lyrics or top lines.

YGR: Was there a clear moment where you felt like, “I am now a musician”? Do you even feel like a musician now?

KAG: I write songs but I don’t consider myself a musician. I just cannot bring myself to get passionate about getting good at instruments. It doesn’t get me excited at all. I always tell people I’m a musician like Irving Berlin, and I’m absolutely trying to be funny when I say it, but as I understand it the guy couldn’t really play piano and he never let that stop him from contributing some of our greatest entries in the great American songbook. Not saying I’ve made anything like that, but I think about how he never let that stop him if I’m feeling bad about my musicianship. My ego is not in the technician aspect of instrument-playing, but I know my rudimentary way around the basics of a few. On this new record it’s mostly me and my producer Meg playing or programming stuff, and then Gleb Wilson on drums (“Unglued”, I think a few others) and “Expo ‘70” bass. Mastering engineer Roberto Schilling added some low-end in a few places like the “I’m Your Man” cover, and then there’s a great guitar cameo from Forest Juziuk on “Unglued”.

YGR: Have you learned anything from “Lillian Hellman”? Or is it simply just your least favorite if you had to pick, which you so kindly did at my request?

KAG: I think so, because even though I’ve written stuff that I later think is bad since then, I don’t think any other song makes me wince in quite the same way as that one. I have songs where listening back, I’m like JFC, what exactly did I think I was doing here, but then I remember what I thought I was doing (“I was being Nile Rodgers”, “I was being aggressively literal in a way that I thought would come off cool and exciting but maybe sounds more like a bellyflop”) and I don’t feel that bad about it. I think you should only feel bad if you’re phoning it in or playing it safe. Everybody should be aiming for the extremes where you’re either going to be fantastic or sucking really bad a little more.