Q&A: Catie Turner Chronicles the Last Two Years of Her Life On ‘Blue Alchemy’

MusicQ&A

Oct 21

INTERVIEW

CATIE TURNER IS BACK AND BOLDER THAN EVER—After nearly 10 years of making music, the LA-based indie-pop singer-songwriter has released her long-awaited debut album, Blue Alchemy, out now.

From catchy pop-rock anthems like “Who Am I” and “Power” to tender acoustic tracks like “I Might” and “Tourist Attraction,” Blue Alchemy has something for everyone, especially 20-somethings looking for camaraderie and a song to jam out to in this chaotic world we live in. Indeed, Turner channels everything—from her melodic voice to her relatable lyrics to her whimsical style—into this debut project that discusses themes of friendship, love and self-discovery.

In the days following the album’s release, Luna got to chat with Turner about her collaborations with friends carobae AKA Caroline Baker (composer and producer) and Kaya Stewart (music video director and fellow musician), her colorful, witchy inspirations as well as what she’s most looking forward to on her tour with LA-based duo Kiss Bang this fall.

Read Luna’s conversation with Turner below.

LUNA: Congratulations on the release of your debut album Blue Alchemy! For readers who may be unfamiliar, could you briefly describe the sound/style of this project?

TURNER: Blue Alchemy is genuinely the sound of the past two years of my life. I got dropped by a major label, which is really awesome if you think about it. I've done the whole singer-songwriter thing. We get dropped by a major—it's chic. The beauty of not going in thinking it's going to be an album is that every single was literally just written that day for that emotion and what I was feeling at that exact second. When I decided it was an album [and] realized the throughline, it was like, “Oh, wow. This is all my experiences of the past two years.”

We have friendship fights. We have falling in love. We have identity crises galore. The whole theme of the album just became...my journal. And if you're reading a mentally unstable 20-something’s journal, what are you going to find? You're going to find Blue Alchemy. It's a lot of confusion, but a lot of happy triumphs too. It's my first real sappy love song, as sappy as I can get. Usually I write love songs with an element of, “I don't want you to leave. It will ruin everything.” This is the first one that's just like, “I like watching reality television with you.” It's just a lot of firsts for me. A lot of people are going to experience the side of me that I got to experience for the first time as well.

LUNA: Blue Alchemy discusses a range of themes—from finding love to self-image to coming of age as a woman in the modern world. Can you walk us through the songwriting process for this album? What’s one of your favorite tracks off of this project?

TURNER: A lot of [the songs] start[ed] with me going into a session and just talking my shit, whether it's actually shit talking or just talking a bunch of nonsense where I'm fed up about something. They all start with impassioned rants. With “Power,” it started out with me [saying], to my new collaborators [who] I'm literally just meeting that day, “It's so fucking annoying that these guys are like, ‘Have sex with me.’ And then you have sex with them and then they're upset and disgusted you had sex with them. All these rules and rules.” What that meant, in the feminine sense and how destructive it is. I would usually go in with a theme of something I was upset about.

[With] “Who Am I,” I went in with carobae [Caroline Baker] and I was literally on an Instagram bender. I was going insane. I was looking at girls’ scrapbooks and going, “Their fucking scrapbooks look better than mine! Their handwriting is better than mine! She's ginger too—why didn't I write that lyric? Who am I in this modern market?” You hear the phrase “celebrity hair theory” and you're like, “What's mine?” I just have straight fucking ginger hair. When's my awakening going to happen out of my head? That's usually how every song came to be.

“Deer On 95” is a special song for me. It's been hard as a songwriter to trust myself writing independently again. Usually I go into sessions and—though I write a lot of the songs and it's all my ideas—I got used to the crutch of having somebody there that you could be like, “Does this suck? Check my work with a red pen. Do I suck?” “Deer On 95” was just me on my bed again. It happened very naturally. And I realized, “Oh, I didn't lose my songwriting ability.” It wasn't some magic that was taken away from me by a troll. I can do this. That was actually one of the last songs I wrote for the album. That was really beautiful for me to have [it be] the first song [where] the verse and the chorus was all me.

LUNA: The music videos for singles “California,” “Who Am I” as well as “Girls’ Girl” (featuring Sophie Holohan) feature colorful sets and whimsical costumes reminiscent of the Y2K era alongside your tender, relatable lyrics. What was the inspiration behind the bold visual identity of this album?

TURNER: Before it was an album, I was doing all the visuals myself. If you go back and watch the “Shrinking Violet” or “Not Young, Just Dumb” videos, it was me with my damn VHS [camcorder], CapCut and a dream. When I realized it was going to be an album, I met my friend Kaya Stewart. It was one of those amazing moments where you meet a collaborator or another creative person, [and you’re] just like, “You're on the same frequency and you just get it.”

“Girls” started with me and her exclaim[ing] something out loud—“What if we did this?” I suggested for “California,” “What if it's a zombie apocalypse?” We're just spitballing and she could keep up with me. With the flashy costumes and everything, it wasn't even something we talked about of, “Do you want the costumes to be super bright?” It just had to be that because it was born before we even met. With “Who Am I,” the inspiration was that I used to love the online game Stardoll. Kaya went, “I love Stardoll.” I'm like, “Well, holy shit. Now we’ve got to do a Stardoll-themed music video.” That's been the inspiration behind those videos—our friendship and how we just say the most outlandish things.

LUNA: As you mentioned, you played a huge role in creating these music videos both behind and in front of the camera. What was your experience filming these visual companions like?

TURNER: I'm going to be quite candid: sometimes I needed to instill the help of an edible to be in front of the camera. Because Kaya will shout these instructions! With “Who Am I,” the lyric is, “Are identities like an orgasm? Will I know when I have one? / God, I want to have one, when am I going to have one?” And she's like, “Grab your chocha!” (laughs). Oh, the consequences of writing this piece. So I need some liquid courage.

Don't get me wrong, I’m an attention whore. It's a big thing in my astrology chart. There’s a part of me that loves being behind the camera [too]. I’m the resident photographer friend. I love lighting. I love taking pictures of people in beautiful lighting. Sometimes it's just hard to imagine me there because no one else can get it right. I tell my boyfriend, “I want this shot and I want this angle. I want the light coming in from this way and [if] you do it, it'll be slightly askew.” It's my control issues. It's really hard sometimes because only I can see what the fuck I'm talking about, but finding the right crew, collaborators and creative partners—that has been a lot of stress off my back because they see things I can't see. That's how I usually balance the two—a lot of trust in other people.

Finding collaborators that don't believe in “less is more”—that's been really fun because it's basically a challenge every time we shoot now of, “How outlandish can I be?” Usually way more—like crawl on the ground, fall, fake a heart attack, roll over, blow a kiss, do the most! That’s been really great at breaking me out of my shell again. I went a little inwards for a long time because of being too much or “That's not socially correct” and now it's like…we're back.

LUNA: You’ve been releasing music for nearly 10 years and some of the singles from Blue Alchemy came out as early as June of 2025. How does it feel to finally have this project out in the world?

TURNER: I've sat with these songs for so long that I can hear every breath, every pitch error. I've just hyper fixated on these songs. Now that they're out, I haven't even listened to the album all the way through, to be honest. Once it came out, I was like, “I can't even listen to it. She's good. Now everyone else gets to listen to her.”

She wasn't meant to be an album. She was a collection of singles. But then I went, “Wait a second, I can't just keep putting out singles.” I was so scared of using the phrase “debut album” because it's sacred. You want to be the bitch that's like, “I charted number five on the Billboard Top 100 for eight weeks with my debut.” I was really clinging on to that, white knuckling it. I was like, “I'm gonna call 14 songs a mixtape,” but [then] I'm like, “No one's gonna take me seriously.” So now it’s my debut album. Now I can just make music.

It's different once you put an album out. Now I can just make another one and I can make another one and holy shit there's no rules! I'm so rigid sometimes with my thinking which doesn't make any sense because I’m, to an extent, very much [a] fly by the seat of my pants and fuck rules [person], but, for some reason, certain things I become very rigid on. Like songs having to rhyme and these odd things. With “Who Am I,” I didn't rhyme in the bridge and then with putting this debut album [out]...once you break one of these impossible rules you put in your head you're like, “This is awesome. Now, I can do anything.”

LUNA: This fall, you’ll be headlining a tour to support the release of Blue Alchemy alongside LA-based duo Kiss Bang. How are you feeling about this incredible milestone in your career, and what are you most looking forward to as you prepare for this tour?

TURNER: I'm just so excited to do it for fun. Why I lost a lot of my joy for music for a couple years was because you get so caught up in milestones or words that you show to other people and you're like, “These are important, right? Which means I'm important?” It scared me off touring for a while and performing because, if I didn't sell out a show in five seconds, well, I'm chopped and screwed and I need to be executed immediately (laughs).

But with this tour coming up, I'm just so excited to have fun. Kiss Bang are my good friends. I’m so lucky. I get to go on a road trip with my friends to do what I love, which is performing. I get to see all my fans that I haven't been able to see in a long time. We get to do it sloppy style: I'm talking Holiday Inns and sleeping on couches and long, long drives. I love the people I'm doing it with. I love the people that I'm going to see.

In Columbus, I get to see my first internet friend I ever made, Destiny. We met when I was 12 years old. It's crazy because we used to catfish other people on Instagram and roleplay Camila Cabello and Luke Hemmings together. [Now], she gets to see me on a stage and I get to be like, "Bitch, who would have thought I would have gotten off the computer?" It's very full circle for me and I'm just excited to try to be a little better than I was and try to do something different every night. I'm gonna be playing the bass, something new.

Kaya’s in Kiss Bang, so it's been really amazing. When the opening act makes you get your shit together…She's like, “Here are my outfits and here's what I'm going to do.” I'm like, “I have to step my pussy up because she's not holding back!” It's good when your friends push you to be better, do something different and make it a show. I can say that it's going to be a show because Kaya has us painting mailboxes out of cardboard and buying picket fences. If you think you're coming for just me on an acoustic guitar, doing my singer-songwriter thing, you are very mistaken because Kaya's not letting me do that! I can't just do that. By this time next month, I might as well have choreography (laughs). I want to be as inclusive to [Kiss Bang] as possible because they're also doing the brutal driving and they're also there with me, making it a celebration of friendship, fun and whimsy.

LUNA: Finally, what are some pieces of media (music, films, books, etc.) you’ve been drawing inspiration from recently?

TURNER: Well, I've been going back to a lot of basics, a lot of who made me love music. Catfish and the Bottlemen are my favorite band of all time, my real favorite band. One Direction is my favorite band, but if we want to talk musically, Catfish and the Bottlemen is what really got me into [music], they're so fucking good. I've been listening to a lot of them. A lot of the girls from the ‘90s. I don't know why it took me so long to get into Alanis Morissette in a real meaningful way. Once you hear “Uninvited,” you're just like, “Holy fuck.”

Media-wise, I love facts. I nerd the hell out and I love books on folklore. I have this book right now that's really inspiring me, a book of old-fashioned superstitions. I'm learning all about the history of superstitions. Witchcraft has really been inspiring me recently. I'm like, “You know what people wouldn't really expect from me, but then it would make sense?” I need to become a witch—that's just the next journey for me. In Irish superstition, one of the bad omens is seeing a redheaded woman first thing in the morning. That's a sign of evil. I like that! I want to be a bad omen for a man first thing in the morning (laughs). So history and idioms and knowing where things came from. And of course, Tumblr.