Katy Guillen and the Drive’s new LP Make That Sound shimmers through the darkness

Katy Guillen & The Drive. // photo credit Lava Dreams

Kansas City’s Katy Guillen has been a staple of the blues and rock scene for well over a decade now, going all the way back to work with drummer Go-Go Ray in the early ’00s before starting Katy Guillen & the Girls, whose blues-informed rock ‘n’ roll delighted audiences until they played their farewell shows in December 2018.

Since then, singer/guitarist Guillen and drummer Stephanie Williams (who is also Guillen’s partner) have been making music as Katy Guillen & the Drive, and leaning more toward the indie rock end of the musical spectrum.

That’s a sound very much on display on the duo’s upcoming sophomore album, Make That Sound, due out Friday, October 17. While the record’s second single and opening track, “Outcome,” threads the space between blues and indie, the second song “Feel Good,” is a shimmering and slow number that could easily find its way into college radio rotation alongside Japanese Breakfast. “Love You For All Time” is a note-perfect flip-the-record song, whose audience-sing-along-ready refrain will likely become a deep-cut favorite.

Listening to the record, the steps forward are exhilarating, but even the familiar takes on new approaches, as with the soaring guitar work on “What If” or the glorious build of the title track, and when we speak with Guillen via Zoom one afternoon, we say as much when when we note that every album the musician makes is a step toward something new.

“Yeah, I think that’s kind of always the goal, honestly,” Guillen agrees. “When you listen back to old albums, you’re always like, ‘This is what I would do differently. This is what I would’ve maybe done here.’”

When Guillen and Williams pivoted from the Girls to the Drive, the frontwoman says they learned a lot more about the recording process and some of the things they wanted to try in the studio, as well as some of the things that they wanted to try with their songwriting.

“With Another One Gained, that was a whole new type of process for us and a real step out into a direction that we hadn’t been before,” says Guillen of the Drive’s debut release. “And then with this one, it was kind of the same thing.”

To that end, the duo decided to record this album in another location and bring in new collaborators with whom they’d never worked, an approach they’d taken on Another One Gained. Fortunately, it’s worked out well for Katy Guillen & The Drive on both occasions.

“If you make that choice, it’s gonna inevitably sound different,” Guillen admits. “It’s just a matter of finding those things that you wanna do to make the album special, or to make the process different and new.”

Make That Sound was produced by Megan McCormick and recorded in Nashville in the basement studio of Brandon Bell’s house in what’s described by Guillen as a very chill atmosphere. While it was a modest setup, Bell’s knowledge and skill, combined with the relaxing surroundings, allowed the band to feel comfortable and make good music. Producer McCormick would also go on to play bass on Make That Sound, and Bell would offer up his trained ears in an engineer role.

“Steph and I had a batch of songs for this album,” says Guillen of the recording process. “We showed them to her and, and on a few of ’em, we really worked through them with her and jammed on them before we went into the studio, but most of the songs we ended up tracking pretty right away in the studio.”

For the majority of the songs on the record, the group would work on them for about an hour beforehand and then live-tracked the guitar, bass, drums and, and scratch vocals, before then playing around with layering some other touches.

While Guillen and Williams are both musical and romantic partners, the latter aspect does—and doesn’t—change the former.

“Even back with the Girls, she was always one of my main soundboards,” Guillen says of Williams, “And now is the first person I show an idea to–like, the very first person that I’ll be like, ‘Does this sound okay?’ Sometimes I’ll write something and I’ll be like, ‘This sounds like it was maybe already a song?’”

During the COVID pandemic, Guillen and Williams’ creative process got a lot closer when the pair were holed up at home like everyone else. During the lockdown, the two put together a small home studio and due to proximity, ended up working more closely on writing than they ever had before.

“That’s just continued since Covid,” continues Guillen. “I feel like Covid changed our creative relationship for the better, in a way, because it’s, it’s so hard to find that time that quiet creative time at home when you are just constantly going and there’s a lot of road gigs and you’re in and out of town and you’re on and off the road.”

The writing space Guillen needs, she says, is one in which nothing is happening. To write songs, the musician says she sometimes sits for days, closing her computer and shutting down her phone to shed some of the noise “to hear what’s really happening inside.” That’s what she says happened over the pandemic, and that allowed her and Williams to really come together creatively in a much more intimate way than they ever had before.

At this point, Guillen says, they’ve been through so much, the two of them, with recording, shows, bandmates, the road, and more, that she feels it’s only helped their relationship, and that strength is a big part of the sound that continues to evolve.

Another aspect of that evolution is the frequent addition of the Swallowtails’ Mikala Petillo on bass for some of their live shows. While it’s not a constant thing, due to budgeting and routing, Guillen feels fortunate that Katy Guillen & The Drive can sometimes expand.

“To be able to bring someone like Miki on the road with us has been just amazing,” Guillen enthuses. “I mean, she’s our go-to girl right now.”

Now that Make That Sound is ready to release to the world, we ask Guillen if there is a particular song on the record that she can point to that ties everything together, and with no hesitation, she brings up the title track, which dates back to the middle of the Another One Gained cycle several years ago.

“That song is about finding the thing inside of you that you need to find to literally just keep moving your feet–to keep walking, keep moving forward,” explains the musician. “Sometimes that is literally all you feel like you can do when you’re just depleted of your energy.”

To Guillen, “Make That Sound” encapsulates the whole idea of pushing through and loving yourself, which can be found throughout the entire record. At the time she wrote it, Guillen says it felt like, due to one thing after another, she needed to rally herself and that’s what “Make That Sound” is about.

There are other themes happening, as well, Guillen says, with a lot of love also suffusing Make That Sound.

“There’s songs that I wrote for Steph,” she says. “There are songs that I wrote for some family members. There’s a song that I wrote for a pet. There’s songs that I wrote for myself. There’s a lot of self-love– ‘Take a Break’ is a self-care song.”

Even before you’ve heard one note of Make That Sound, the cover image by Lava Dreams should be more than enough to tip your attention to the fact that breaking out of the darkness is what this record is all about.

“What I wanted it to feel like was just a really simple light in the dark, you know?” posits Guillen. “Here’s the love, here’s the light–and the darkness is out there, but here’s the light. Just a simple and straightforward concept. I didn’t mean it to turn out looking a little bit witchy, but I kinda love that, and I’m like, ‘This is kind of perfect. It’s coming out in October. Okay. Sometimes things just work out.’”

Katy Guillen & The Drive’s Make That Sound is out Friday, October 17, via Are and Be Recordings.

The album release party is at Knuckleheads on Friday, November 14, with Angela Purley. Details on that show here.