IMMORTALIZED : an Interview/Q&A with Katie Glasgow
an Interview by Sophia Ymele
Source : Instagram
Immortadelle sat down with singer/YouTuber Katie Glasgow for a small interview/Q&A on the occasion of I03's release as Katie's dreamy and nostalgic videos have been an inspiration for the creation of this issue.
Could you introduce yourself ?
My name is Katie, I live in NYC where I work a 9-5 in the music industry, play in a band called Sally Hatchet, and create and share Youtube videos. I’ve been ‘virtual journaling’ for a little over a year now as a way to store my memories, but also as a way to explore all the different kinds of creativity I love, like creating the background music for the videos, drawing/painting in the journal, and learning about/playing with different kinds of animation.
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I know you’ve already talked about this in one of your videos but Why do you use old cameras to film your videos ? And how has your love for cameras and capturing moments come to be ?
I love to use digital cameras from the early 2000s to film and take photos for a lot of reasons. Mainly, I think the footage just looks so much more like memories. A lot of that is because of the nostalgia I have around videos and photos from my childhood that were taken on cameras like these, but also the blurriness and the way they capture light feels to me like it represents the moments better than a crisp iPhone camera.
I’ve always been obsessed with capturing moments. I think as a very anxious person, I am always trying to hold onto experiences, especially times in life that feel special and good. Making videos helps me release some of that anxiety about time passing.
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Where do you get your ideas for your editing style ?
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I’m inspired by other Youtubers for sure. Leahsfieldnotes was the first Youtuber I saw using an old blurry camera for b-roll and that’s I think why I initially dug up my parents’ old camcorder and started playing with it.
For more recent videos, I’ve been pulling inspiration from 90s-2000s TV shows and movies. Someone actually commented on a few of my TikTok videos that my Youtube reminded them of ‘All About Lily Chou-Chou’, which I hadn’t seen at the time but then watched out of curiosity. I would put out a huge trigger warning to anyone thinking about watching it (!!) but it has some extremely beautiful and interesting visual elements and use of music that I definitely am taking inspiration from these days. I also have been playing with some editing inspired by Serial Experiments Lain, both from the TV show and from the Playstation game.
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How has your love for music come to be ?
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My family is very musical, so I was surrounded by it since I was a kid. I started singing lessons when I was very young, I think in 1st grade. My hometown happened to have an opera house and my voice teacher directed the children’s chorus for their productions, so I wound up performing in those operas for much of growing up, and then eventually going to college for classical voice/opera studies. I always had an interest in doing other kinds of music than classical, and while at NYU I met a lot of people in indie rock bands and producing their own music and I got more into that world. I transferred out of classical voice and into the music business program my junior year, and have been exploring all different kinds of music (including the industry side) ever since. I just love to be around music and around other people that love music, that’s what is most important to me.
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Do you have any ongoing music projects you would like to share with the mag ?
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So I mentioned I play in a band called Sally Hatchet, and we’re in the final stages of recording our first EP. The project has honestly taken a bit of a back seat ever since my job has gotten a lot busier in the recent months, but I’m hoping to get the EP wrapped up by the winter and to start releasing in the spring.
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Do you also use music as a way of capturing moments of your life ?
I definitely used to! I used to write songs mainly to process breakups, and to say things that I couldn’t say to exes lol. Which I guess isn’t really capturing moments as much as trying to rid myself of them?
Now that I’ve been in a stable, healthy, lovely relationship for almost 4 years, I write songs more from my imagination, or a lot of the time from dreams that I have. Or just to express an emotion without a specific moment tied to it.
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What does immortalizing mean to you ?
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Like I said with making videos, a lot of my motivation behind it has been wanting to preserve special moments or phases of life. But I also think what happens when you create anything that represents a moment or a feeling, most of it will get lost in translation - which is not at all a bad thing. You can never recreate an experience entirely, but you can turn it into something new and something special on its own. And I think if you’ve done a good job of it, it still holds a core of that original thing you set out to preserve. I think immortalizing is when 1) you manage to hold the core of something in its new form and 2) that new form is shared in some way that means it’s no longer contained by your own brain. Whether it’s on the internet or on a stage or just told to a friend, once it moves out from your brain and into the universe in some way, I think it becomes immortalized.
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What would you say to an upcoming artist/musician/vlogger ?
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Don’t pigeon-hole yourself! What I love about creating videos is that I get to try a little bit of everything every time I make a video. I used to do commissioned songwriting for this platform that was very, very cookie cutter (it had to be 8 lines of verse, 4 lines of chorus, certain instrumentation, etc.) and I think it sucked a lot of the joy of music creation out of me. I didn’t get the joy back until I started making my own music for Youtube videos, and it could be whatever I wanted it to be. Any creative pursuit should be about exploration and freedom, I think. And if you close yourself off to something that calls you, you’ll get in a bad habit of quieting your creative voice and it will shy away.
Oh, and I know it’s a cliche but I love the idea of ‘creating bad art’. Go in with the intention of just making something that sucks, and you release a lot of the voices in your head that put you in a corner.
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