Brett CallwoodThe Two Worlds of Katery: Mexican singer, songwriter and actress Katery is very much a renaissance woman. Since elementary school, she’s been hooked on performing whether that be in the form of acting or creating music. In the end, why choose?
“When we got in the final grade, all the kids did musical theater,” Katery says during a Zoom interview. “They were doing really good plays. It was impressive. I was 11, and I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. Two years later, I got to do it because I was in the final year and oh my god, the feeling of being on a stage for me, it was incredible. This is the thing that I need to do to be happy. It was beautiful. Since then, with my family, I was like, ‘hey, please, take me to acting classes, take me to singing classes, please, please, please.’ My father and mother tried to do that and they did it, but they didn’t know anything about that world. It was quite difficult for them to know, ‘this school is right, what should we do next?’
Still, they encouraged her by introducing the fledgling artist to the likes of Pink Floyd and Queen. When she was 14, Katery was taking acting, singing and even drumming classes as she endeavored to get a rounded artistic education. Then she got a break.
“I got an audition for a TV commercial here in Mexico,” she says. “It was my first audition and it was incredible because it was like, I got it. My first audition and I got it.”
Katery relocated from Mexico City to Los Angeles in 2019 and was here for about a year before COVID ruined everyone’s plans.
“When I moved there, I was studying at Lesly Kahn acting class,” she says. “It was really cool, but then I needed to come back home and be safe. I went to India to visit – I just came back. My album is about empathy and compassion, and that we are the same. We are the mirror of ourselves and we can see it in the other one. For me, India was like, ‘yeah, I need to know everyone there. I need to understand Hinduism and Buddhism because maybe there’s something that they do and they know that I don’t. So I need to go there.’ Also, it was funny because two of my favorite people are from India but I met one in L.A. and the other in New York. But that’s another story.”
Besides the inconvenience of the pandemic, Katery returned to Mexico to promote a short film she appeared in – Díaz, directed by Mauricio Ochmann. For the most part though, she grabbed the opportunity during the lockdown to knuckle down on her music, and find her sound.
“I would say that I like to experiment with different genres,” she says. “Like, I like electronic music but my music is not full electronic music. I also like to play with different instruments from around the world. In this case, sounds from Middle Eastern or Indian music. I mix genres. Also on this album, we have rock because I wanted some drums there. So rock, electronic and pop, I could say.”
Katery’s new album is called Undoubtedly Intertwined. Prior to that, she released Muses and Muses II – one EP of covers that she split into two.
“It’s all covers by people like Ariana Grande,” she says. “Undoubtedly Intertwined is the album, and ‘Two Worlds’ is the first single. It’s nine songs, and the first is ‘Two Worlds’.”
Ah yes, that new single. There is a complicated narrative running through her single releases that even when speaking to Katery about it, only gets more muddied. She swears that as more songs drop, everything will clear up.
“My message is to tell the people that we can save the world together,” she says. “That’s the message of the whole album. So for this introduction of the story, I just wanted to explain that we are two groups of people. The first one, we are these cyborgs that are looking for time capsules in these different civilizations. Post-apocalyptic civilizations and planets, all around the universe. When we get to this dystopian planet, it’s Earth, and we get to know these hooded people. We think they want the time capsule but they don’t, they want to murder another guy because that’s the bad guy. I’m giving you a lot of information, but all this information is going to be in the other videos. This is only the introduction of the story. You can see the characters, and that they are two different groups of people. That’s all. That’s the information that you need now.”
Wowzers. Take a bite out of that! Oh, but she’s not done.
“Also, we all have different perspectives,” Katery says. “We are not bad or good. That’s one of the points that I want to tell the world. One of them is from the future, because she knows what’s going to happen. It’s myself, from the future. I’m giving out spoilers now.”
Cyborgs, time capsules, murder, dystopian planets and future Katery? Ok then. The album was recorded in Mexico during the pandemic, with collaborator Milo Campos.
“We composed it and produced it together,” says Katery. “But the lyrics are all mine.”
At the moment then, acting is taking a backseat. That’s how Katery is achieving balance.
“I feel that it’s in stages,” she says. “From age 16 to 22, I was into just acting. Because of the pandemic, I was like, ‘ok acting needs to wait.’ There’s not a healthy way to be in a set and everything. It’s not going to happen in this moment. So maybe that’s why it was easier to finish this album, because I was into music. That’s the only thing I had to do. But yeah, it’s difficult.”
This is where his focus is, so keep your eye out for more new releases in the early part of 2023.
The Two Worlds of Katery: Katery’s “Two Worlds” is out now.
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