Kat Lock is about to be “Talkin’ Bout Love,” but this time, she’s not talkin’ ’bout anyone in particular.
“I kind of started writing differently a couple years ago, probably during COVID and all that,” Lock said. “I’m trying to make songs more universal, more general in a way.”
Lock plans to release her latest single, “Talkin’ Bout Love,” on Friday, June 13. The song will be Lock’s first release since “Next Christmas,” a single from November 2023 and The Retrograde EP released in January of the same year.
“What I like about ‘Talkin’ Bout Love’ is that it’s obviously a love song, but it’s not actually about anybody. … I think people really often misuse the word ‘manifesting.’ You know? And I think it gets a little corny, but in a way, I feel like that kind of is what the song is. Because it’s nothing specific. It’s just describing all the feelings and the things that happen alongside it … whether you like it or not.”
When we spoke to Lock in the Before Times (July 2019), she was working to make a name for herself outside her former band, St. Basic, and overcoming fears that some of her songs were so personal and specific that listeners might figure out the real person who inspired the lyrics.
Following COVID in 2020 and surgery on her right shoulder in 2021, Lock approached songwriting differently.
“I knew for a long time I wasn’t going to be able to play any instruments or anything like that, so I decided that I was going to learn how to use GarageBand and just, like, bare-minimum produce,” Lock said. “When I started doing that, the songs that I was writing were really poppy. … and I’d been running away from the pop name for a long time, but I think these are the best songs that I’ve ever written.”
For Lock, poppier means more universal.
“I know I have a song when I capture the feeling of something and then other experiences that mean different things and are totally different, but have that same core feeling,” Lock said. “It might sound like a love song, and it might be one, but it can be about a friendship, a new home, a new job, anything. … I have one song that’s unreleased, but it sounds like it’s about a love song or a breakup, and it’s just about an emergency root canal that I had to have.”
Self-producing her own demos also gives Lock the chance to write songs on her own time table.
“I found it takes me a lot longer to write a song now,” Lock said. “For ‘Talkin’ Bout Love’ specifically, I remember getting the idea for this song in, like, 2022, and I found the chorus. Then I just couldn’t figure out the verses at all, and I just waited and … never forced myself to finish it. You know? Eventually, I think I did make a track that just had empty spaces in the verses and just listened to it until one day, ‘OK. There it is. Found it.’”
Lock’s health also continues to complicate her creative process.
“After I had that surgery, it ended up not really helping,” Lock said. “I still struggle to play instruments, pretty much. That’s why I don’t do it live anymore. … Every now and then, I’ll do a little bit, but for the most part, it’s just better if I don’t. I’ve been diagnosed with, like, four or five other things since then, and my health has unfortunately become the main character of my life for the last few years, so that’ll make you reevaluate how you do everything.”
Lock recorded “Talkin’ Bout Love,” and scheduled follow-up single “Shut Me Up” at RCA Studio C in Nashville with Grammy-nominated producer Eddie Gore and guitarist Tyler Cain (Gavin DeGraw, Colbie Caillat). With “Talkin’ Bout Love,” Lock is aiming for a sweet spot somewhere between country and pop.
“I want it to be like this generation’s, ‘This Kiss,’” Lock said, referencing the 1998 Faith Hill hit. “The Shania Twain songs, Faith Hill, that’s kind of the vibe. Just like classic Kohl’s music.”
Following the release of “Talkin’ Bout Love,” Lock is scheduled to perform Saturday, June 21, at Jazz in June at Andrews Park, 201 W. Daws St., in Norman.
Visit katlock.com.
This article appears in Summer Guide 2025.