SPOTLIGHT: Kaia Kater Sizes Up What Matters in ‘Maker Taker’ [VIDEO]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Kaia Kater is No Depression’s Spotlight artist for May. Learn more about her and her new album, Strange Medicine (out May 17 on Free Dirt Records), in our interview, and look for more all month long.

It takes a lot to be a maker.

Artists of any kind put so much of themselves into their work. For musicians, of course, energy for creating must be carved out from the effort required for recording, performing, touring, promoting, living, experiencing, and thinking about the next song. Energy for making can be sapped, most of all, when there’s too much outside interference to deflect.

Kaia Kater wrote “Maker Taker,” from her new album, Strange Medicine, with that drain on energy in mind. During the stillness of the pandemic, she noticed her people-pleasing tendencies getting in the way of her artistic process. She’d agonize over how people might interpret a song, or how it would or would not help her career.

“I’d really overthink it and get away from the art and what I wanted to say,” she says in a video for No Depression readers. “It led me to taming a lot of the things that I had to say, which I think is really the opposite direction that a folksinger wants to go in.”

In “Maker Taker,” Kater sizes up the outside voices and vows “to starve those hungry ghosts, play what I know.” She asks, pointedly: “Who’s the maker, and who’s the taker?”

Listen to a special performance of the song below, a day before it comes out with the rest of Strange Medicine: