Q&A: Katie Schecter Embraces Her Divine Feminine Power in ‘Empress’
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photo Credit: CJ Harvey
FEMININE POWER IS UNYIELDING, INTUITIVE AND FIERCE — It’s the quiet authority of creation, of nurturing and knowing, of surrendering to imperfection without losing conviction. On her third studio album Empress, Katie Schecter embodies that duality, stepping fully into her creative and spiritual sovereignty. Recorded live to tape at New York City’s legendary Diamond Mine Studio while she was pregnant with her daughter, Empress captures the raw electricity of womanhood in motion — cyclical, intuitive and endlessly generative.
Produced by her husband Nick Bockrath (Cage the Elephant), Empress feels like an invocation and a reclamation of feminine power as both an artist and a mother. Across eleven tracks, Schecter distills life’s double-edged lessons into songs that breathe with analog warmth and emotional clarity. Supported by a powerhouse ensemble — Nick Movshon and Homer Steinweiss (rhythm), Russ Pahl (pedal steel), Leon Michels (piano) and Matt Combs (strings) — the record’s soulful heartbeat manifests into the sound of a woman fully in her element.
Schecter envisioned Empress as “one unified listening experience in a time of consistent polarity.” In doing so, she sought to find common ground through the universal truths that connect us.
“We all dream, love, fear, have control, and lose it entirely,” Schecter says. The album’s sonic vision, which she describes as a “dubbed-out Supremes,” imagines Doris Troy, John Lennon, Amy Winehouse, and Bill Withers collaborating at The Black Ark.
The album opens with its title track, a song Schecter says “wrote itself.” “‘Empress’ is the birth of a new idea, the renewal of a mindset; it is selflessness, motherhood, creativity, conviction and fertility of the imagination,” she says. “It’s for anyone who loves something or someone unconditionally; for those who treasure what it takes to be a woman, our strengths, our nuances and imperfections alike.”
Empress celebrates the resilience of the feminine spirit.
“It’s for the dimwits who think they can make laws about our bodies, yet cower in the presence of our innate power,” Schecter says. “Empress is for my daughter Only, hoping she can remain confident, soft, and unwavering in a society testing her self-possession at every turn.”
In embracing imperfection, Schecter has found liberation. Empress feels like a manifesto. It’s a tribute to womanhood, autonomy and the unshakable softness that lives within us all.
Photo Credit: CJ Harvey
LUNA: Welcome back and thank you for talking to Luna again. It's super exciting to have you back since the last time we talked about your single “Pay It No Mind.” I would love to catch up and see how life has been treating you and what have you been up to since the last time we talked.
KATIE: I have been gearing up to put out this record. I have been mommy-ing hardcore. My husband's band opened for Oasis, so between my three year old starting preschool and going to see dad out on the road for those epic shows, life has been very fun, I will say, in my little bubble of privilege. Otherwise, yesterday I had rehearsal. I have an album release show this weekend, which feels really exciting. And, just leaning into Empress season.
LUNA: You have released your third record Empress and a huge congratulations is in order! Even the title of the album is so empowering. What is the inspiration behind the project and what themes and emotions did you set out to explore?
KATIE: I wrote the song “Empress” in 2021. I don't believe I was pregnant yet, which is funny, because the symbolism of Empress, or the meaning behind what that word is, a lot about motherhood and fertility, but also fertility of the mind and creation and ideas. I really like that, because I don't think you have to be a mother to a person in order to feel like an empress. Empress does not discriminate. It's really entering a space of feeling your own power and embracing it, rather than running from it and just honing all that good stuff. Ironically, I did record the bulk of the album while my baby girl was in my belly. It does feel like this extra layer of meaning to it. I love that she was part of the recording process, whether or not she chose that. I wrote this album for me. I think there's something for everyone to connect with on this record. There's still a war against women, not in just foreign places, but right here on home turf. I just felt the need to remind us all of our divine feminine power, because it's in us, whether or not we choose to act on it.
LUNA: Empress marks your first album since 2020’s Bad for Business. What new chapters or sides of yourself are you exploring on this project?
KATIE: I think we talked about this a little bit last time, but I really think I had more of a focused idea of what I wanted things to sound like and feel like I feel like. Bad for Business was sonically more all over the place, trying to figure out what felt like home for me, and the subject matter is slightly more tortured — just a little bit unresolved. I feel that I've grown as a person and also an artist since making that record, and I think that shows in this album. I hope so. Anyway, it feels like it does to me. I feel like it's the type of record you can put on and listen to from start to finish, and it's not a total roller coaster. It's a really nice trip. That's really what I was hoping to express with this record. It's also the same musician as the last album, give or take a couple. The live recording, the band is the same, and those guys are absolute legends. It's cool to get to do another project with the people who I love to create with.
LUNA: You’ve described Empress as “one unified listening experience in a time of consistent polarity.” Can you elaborate on what unity means to you in both a musical and emotional sense?
KATIE: I think music really brings people together. Whether or not we want to admit it, I think that we're all more alike than we think, and we're all here, inhabiting this one Earth. I think that there are things that bring us all together. I do feel like we're in a strange period of time where it feels like the constant need to divide and set each other apart. I obviously don't agree with a lot of what's going on, but I do think that at the end of the day, music unites, like when you're in the crowd at a show, we’re all sharing our love for this one thing all together. That supersedes all the hate and all the opposition. I think music is such an important thing in that way, and more important than ever right now.
LUNA: You recorded Empress at The Diamond Mine in NYC while pregnant with your daughter. How did that experience — physically, emotionally, spiritually — influence the energy of the sessions?
KATIE: I was really healthy at the time, so I think that I felt really good and in control of my voice. But then, to be honest, yesterday, at rehearsal, there was one song that I've really not played live with a band since tracking the vocals on the record, and I couldn't believe how much more breath I had in me without a baby weighing on my lungs. Being pregnant is really uncomfortable, so it's like, how bad do you want it? You could either power through, or you could say, I'm taking a knee. For some reason, I had the feeling in me to power through. I’m feeling a little more mobile these days with a little bit more breath.
LUNA: Did you take any creative risks or experiment with new approaches on Empress compared to Bad for Business? What felt different this time around in how you expressed yourself?
KATIE: One thing that is particularly exciting for me is that my husband produced the record. There was a video he took when I first heard my daughter's heartbeat the very first time in the doctor's office. It was these two women, and they are all excited about it for me. I had him fly that audio clip into one of the recordings, which is called “Hidden Place.” I ended up putting that right at the top of the song, so you can hear her heartbeat. That's the last track of the record. The song is really about always being there for you, so that's the last track of the album and it's when my life really started.
LUNA: What is your favorite song from Empress and why do you love it? Is there a certain lyric or message that stands out to you the most?
KATIE: I love “Hidden Place” a lot, but I also like “Kaleidoscope,” because it's definitely got a dubbed out, ska feeling to it. I really love reggae, so I thought maybe I could do my own dub situation and this is what's in my heart.
LUNA: What excites you most about this new chapter in your career and what are you hoping listeners — especially younger women — can take away from this new era?
KATIE: I've been getting played on the radio a bunch, which is so freaking cool and that’s new and beyond exciting. I can't even wrap my head around it. I'm like, wait, what? It's just getting played. People are listening to my work. I feel like I've been working so hard to put my music out in front of people, so it's taking on its own life, and it's all been a really slow burn. I feel like I've always stuck to my guns, and I've always made creative choices that I will be proud of for the rest of my life. Not to say that there aren't certain things I would go back in time and redo, but just really standing behind what I believe to be the right creative choices. It's taken a while, but things are starting to feel like they're picking up a little bit.
Don't ever give up. Keep making the work. All you can control is making the work that you believe in and stand behind and make things that one day, when you're not on this earth, you'd be proud of if someone stumbled into your work. If you're an artist, you live forever.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
KATIE: I just cried. So obviously, I'm not doing great, but I am really excited. I'm a little bit overwhelmed. I honestly just feel so seen right now, and it feels really good. I've definitely gone through periods of my life where I've felt like no one was hearing what I was doing. So just really excited, ready to play some shows, ready to play my album release show on Friday. I have a killer band, and it feels like a lot of really wonderful people are going to turn up. So just trying to have some fun, trying to bring people together, trying to feel I just like we can all connect and it doesn't always have to be so polarized.
I guess the one thing that I'm trying to do myself going forward, just to touch on that again, is I just feel like it's really important for us to keep talking and conversing and sharing our ideas. And if someone disagrees with you, that's not something to run from. It's something to engage with, and it's something I'm trying to learn myself, because I think that we're all really charged up, and there's this kind of energy of like, ‘Oh, you think this, well screw you,’ and if we keep going in that direction, we're in big trouble.
I believe that we are really meant to join forces here, because I think the higher powers want to pull us apart and keep us vulnerable and keep us weak, because we're stronger together. I'm not saying that we need to agree with everybody, but I think that we can talk about stuff. We can talk about why we feel how we do, and try and hear each other a little bit more. Where are we going if we keep shutting everyone out? Where does that lead us? Nowhere.
