Katie Schottland - The Swimming Bell Interview
From Philly to the Big Apple to LA, Swimming Bell’s Katie Schottland has quite a unique connection, and an anatomical approach to music, having started playing later in life than the more typical start-up when you're a teenager first finding your parents’ or grandparents’ record stash up in the attic. While making her critical connection to writing and recording music is nothing short of a melodic miracle, Schottland hit the ground running towards the end of her 20s and hasn’t looked back since. With the release of her 2017 debut “The Golden Heart,” the musician immediately gained momentum, conjuring a lush and wonderful body of work that transcends both Coasts by effortlessly expressing the country’s beautiful bookends the way Mitchell and Parton did during their romantic reign on the people’s psyche. Following up on last year’s full-length LP, “Charlie,” Schottland has returned with an electrifying EP, “Somnia,” set for release later this month on Perpetual Doom. We sat down to chat with her about her early years in Philly before relocating to Brooklyn to attend acting school. Quickly shifting mediums and focus, she began playing music as Stills before starting Swimming Bells, and the rest is history, as they say.
Photo: Lisa Bolden
Where are you originally from? When did you first begin to connect with music, specifically the guitar, and was this relevant to your household growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences during your formative years, and how quickly did the gap from learning to play to wanting to perform and record music happen for you?
Photo: Lisa Bolden
I’m originally from Philadelphia and moved to Brooklyn on a whim in 2011. At the time, I was working at the University of Pennsylvania doing addiction research and finishing a master’s in Intercultural Communications. But somewhere in that chapter, I had an existential shift, a quiet jolt, and decided to do something completely different. I moved to New York to go to acting school. Up until then, I hadn’t explored any creative paths. I didn’t think of myself as artistic. But once I opened that door, everything changed. After finishing the acting program, I quickly realized that acting wasn’t quite the right fit, but in the process, I had started teaching myself guitar and writing simple little songs. Around that time, an old friend invited me on tour to sing harmonies, and something clicked. Experiencing live music like that opened me up, and I felt like I had found my place. I grew up listening to Peter, Paul & Mary, the Beatles, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, and Sundays at church, where I didn’t connect with the sermons. But I did love the choir, harmonies, and their slow, satisfying resolutions. I sang in the choir and played violin for a few years in school. I remember holing up in my room as a teenager, avoiding my Dad and new Stepmom by playing her old violin and Suzuki books for hours. I loved the scales, just getting lost in them. I didn’t start learning guitar until I was 29. I’d spent most of my twenties living abroad, working different jobs, trying to figure my thing out. I started with Neil Young songs, thinking it would help to learn something I already knew how to hum. When I was 32, I formed a folk-rock band called Stills with my friend Tom, who had studied at Berklee. We split songwriting duties and played together for a while.
Tell me about the origins of Swimming Bell, what this project means to you, and how this Brooklyn-based project came to be. What does Swimming Bell mean to you, and how did some of the project’s earliest albums, “The Golden Heart,” “Wild Sight,” and last year’s “Charlie” come about? Jumping ahead to your most recent effort, “Somnia,” I’d love to know some of the backstories to songs like “95 At Night,” “Mushrooms In July,” and the album’s opener, and first single, “Meet My Shadow.” How did you initially connect with Lou at Perpetual Doom, and how did the album differ from past releases?
Not long after, I met Oli Deakin on a dating app, of all places, and we quickly became friends. He’s an artist (Lowpines) and producer, and I loved his sensibility. I had some songs that didn’t quite fit with the band, and around the same time, I’d started playing with a loop pedal. I asked Oli if he’d help me make some demos, and he said yes. His family home in London became our studio, a dreamy old house filled with instruments, character, and timeless creative energy. We recorded “The Golden Heart” there, and that’s when Swimming Bell was born. The name came from a deep-sea creature called a siphonophore, a colony of organisms that move together as one. That’s what the music felt like: pieces coming together, layer by layer, like simultaneously painting and carving. That project taught me how much I love recording, the sound, and the space to explore. Once “The Golden Heart” was released, I focused my energy on Swimming Bell as a solo project. My band recorded a second EP, which was the natural end of Stills. Oli and I eventually returned to London to record my first full-length, “Wild Sight.” After touring in 2018 and 2019, I started writing more in my Brooklyn practice space and began to record again with Oli, this time in Brooklyn. Then the pandemic hit. Skipping ahead, I moved to LA in July 2020 and eventually finished recording "Charlie" at my house in Eagle Rock a couple of years later. I met Rob Schnapf the night of my record release at Permanent Records. He had heard "Charlie" being played at the shop, commented on it, and came out to my show. He's a funny guy from New Jersey, so I felt an automatic kinship. A few days after the show, I asked if he would want to produce a couple of newer songs of mine, and so we eventually did that in the spring of 2024. The first round of working with Rob, we recorded two singles that I had written, and we were already playing as a band, so we recorded as a band. They turned out well and sounded great, but I once again realized I didn't like the pressure of recording with a band. It felt like there were too many cooks in the kitchen.
“The name came from a deep-sea creature called a siphonophore, a colony of organisms that move together as one. That’s what the music felt like: pieces coming together, layer by layer, like simultaneously painting and carving.”
That summer, I went east to New York and worked on making some demos with Oli of some even newer ideas. This time, I wanted to shift my sound to more of a percussive and relaxed atmosphere. I remember feeling like I wanted to make a vibe more than a song. I returned to Rob with my demos, and that's when we made "Somnia". This time it was just Rob, his engineer, Matt Scheussler, and me. We pulled in different people for different parts. “Meet My Shadow” is an exploration that simplifies and focuses on the Amaj7 chord. I played the progression repeatedly, and it felt good to sing to. Lyrically, I also wanted to keep it simple, so what you hear is just what came out. “95 at Night” is the most personal song on the EP. I think the pandemic froze my life on the East Coast to the forefront of my mind. My life now is simply a reflection of my real life before 2020. My whole heart is still on the East Coast, no matter how hard I try to settle it here. “Mushrooms in July” is a literal title. I ate some mushrooms that summer and was observing my living room. It felt like an installation. There's a slight hum when you're on psilocybin, much like the hum of a museum. The song is a poem that one day I'm sure I'll understand what it means. For now, I just let it come out however it wants to.
