Carve Out My Name
By talia rose

Some people have imaginary friends as children. They talk to them, with them, through them.
I’ve never really spent much time researching why they do such things, and never had an imaginary friend of my own.
However, in college I began to wrap my mind around a fictional girl named Katie. The kind of girl who sits by fountains
on cloudy days, she runs just to feel her heart race and sings to herself quietly and often. Bottles of wine and days at the seashore,
Katie the Pest is the kind of girl who grew up in the suburbs but dreams of moving in Thoreau-like solitude someday.
All at once, a girl as at ease laying in the backyard as she is discussing Godard and Truffaut over syrah and cigarettes.
-as delighted by a mod club in Chinatown as she is by a conversation with her darling pink nosed cat.

A study in contradictions, Katie the Pest would be the hop skip and leap of emotions of a young woman’s life in flux.
The songs were dripping with anger, but subtly woven.
Katie the Pest would love to earn a living making music, but not the kind of living that denies our freedom,
or forces us to awkwardly beg for anyone’s attention. Katie the Pest would rather invite you in with a warm welcome, take the time to
show you how she prefers to see the world. As artists, we find these times in the world very lovely and terrifying, like moss gardens and tundra.
We can’t help but share this girl Katie who gives voice to all that is joyous and painful for us.
At this phase, Katie the Pest is offered as a suggestion that each and every one of us must find the strength
to heal our old wounds so that the future becomes a thing to look forward to.
All the places we dreamed of going in our lifetimes. love we hoped to share. passion that’s dying to reach out and connect.
Or maybe Katie the Pest is just loud sloppy shoegazer rock, and nothing more.
Either way, it’s a lovely adventure.

"...a girl equally thrilled and bitter, equally knee-sock and wrist-slit. The band is the idea of the Girl, the songs her story.
The narrative's opaque, but the narrative doesn't matter; there's something in the music and the passion it's performed with that exceeds the concept,
makes the concept itself seem a dream we agree to believe in only to avoid the reality we suspect."
-Russel Swensen, La Weekly January 2003