Scottish songwriter Katie Gregson-Macleod has shared new single ‘Your Ex’.
The songwriter was busy studying in Edinburgh, placing sketches online, when the views on her TikTok channel suddenly shot up. Within hours, Katie Gregson-Macleod’s song ‘complex’ was a phenomenon, sparking a life-changing series of events.
Brought up in Inverness, her EP ‘Songs Written For Piano’ was sparked by youth, an attempt to channel her experiences. Driven by honesty, she now follows this with new single ‘Your Ex’, a brisk piece of bittersweet songcraft.
Merging her ultra-relatable lyricism to some deft melodies, Katie’s enchanting work gently over-powers you. In a note, she explains the background and making of the song…
‘Your Ex’ began as an attempt to make light of the discomfort and insecurity that arose from starting to date someone who had a lingering and complicated friendship with their ex. I wrote the lyrics initially as a bit of a pisstake, focusing in the first verse upon a night where I saw the two of them interacting and noticed we shared some likeness, whilst also wondering if there was a grey area there that I didn’t know about.
The purpose of the song’s chorus was initially to reflect my surprising lack of insecurity about it, to make light of it all. Kind of saying, ‘If I were to spiral about this, these are the things I’d imagine were happening’, but acknowledging that in reality, I was in a totally secure position where my feelings weren’t yet at risk of being hurt. It was also the end of a session and I mainly just wanted to write a pop song referencing getting head to a relatively obscure contemporary americana song.
I left the song alone for a while and wrote the rest of the lyrics when the relationship was coming to an end. Suddenly, the intention behind the chorus changed for me and instead the anxieties it centred upon were genuine. As in a lot of what I love to write and listen to, I felt to properly serve this song, the sonics had to be in a more pop and upbeat space. Both timbre and lyric are an attempt to impound and dismiss the insecurity underwriting the song.
Tune in now.
