Kaycie Satterfield

Kaycie Satterfield is an LA-based indie / dream pop artist.

FFO: Mamalarky, Barrie, Katy Kirby, Broken Social Scene

Kaycie Satterfield leans into the endless, prickly change inherent in life. So when the guitarist and singer-songwriter broke her wrist in 2020 and was entirely unable to play her instrument for months, she had no choice but to embrace change. “Guitar is my main source of continuity,” she says. “So I had to learn how to think outside of my current conventions and to work with limitations.” On one hand, she needed to figure out how to write and play with one hand tied behind her back. But the fact that around the same time she had to go through four moves and a breakup meant she'd have to make peace with far more drastic change. And rather than be stuck in dated patterns and stories, Satterfield was newly determined to tell her own story her own way. The resulting album, Rosie (due July 12th via Earth Libraries), is a glistening slice of indie rock that bolsters Satterfield’s impeccable songwriting with a new perspective and rich, synth-driven production.

While the record feels intensely personal—and was clearly the product of a period of tumult—Rosie isn’t a diaristic album listing out pains and experiences. Satterfield manages to bring the listener directly into these moments to live them and feel their own way through it. Ever since she got her first acoustic guitar (inspired by seeing Sheryl Crow on TV, no less), Satterfield has used music to simultaneously understand herself and connect with others. “I get tripped out about the passage of time, and zooming out and writing in this way helps me make peace with time going by,” she says. 

Satterfield recorded Rosie at home, opting to self-produce and have her partner help engineer. “We turned one of the rooms into a drum tracking room, and soundproofed it with every blanket we own,” she laughs. While that might call to mind rough-and-ready lo-fi gems, Satterfield instead captures a production style as lush and intimate as her inner world, knowing when to fill every corner of the canvas with synth dazzle and when to let things breathe and have her powerful vocals take the center.

Throughout the record, Satterfield demonstrates the power of new perspectives, both in her process and in the compositions’ empathic catharsis. “I’ve always loved songs that are both digestible and witty, specific imagery that evokes something much bigger and abstract,” Satterfield says. Across its 13 tracks, Rosie achieves that duality spectrally: its mammoth hooks and glittering production wow at first listen, but each added spin brings the listener further along Satterfield’s irresistible journey through life’s unending changes, finding beauty every step of the way.