Katie Holmes, Author at The Airborne Toxic Event

March 5, 2015

The Secret

This song was originally much longer. Cutting it down was the first and last time I ever took advice from a label. I wrote this song driving my car around Los Angeles one night when everything felt like some kind of post-apocalyptic wasteland. Something about imagining people somewhere else, carefree […]

March 5, 2015

Strange Girl

The Cure was my favorite band growing up. This song is about the song “The Perfect Girl” — and all those great Cure songs to which I knew every single word — and how much music can mean to you when you’re a kid and how as you get older […]

March 5, 2015

All For A Woman

So much of this record was written about the two and a half years we’d spent on the road after playing shows in Silver Lake, going from living in apartments to living on a bus — and the experience, all of it, was predicated mostly upon the popularity of a […]

March 5, 2015

The Storm

The Storm – The whole approach of this record (unlike the first two, and very unlike the upcoming record) was to just play songs in a room — with all natural sounds, no keyboards, no added production — just the five of us and our instruments, our voices. This song, […]

March 5, 2015

All At Once

This was the first time I ever wrote a song with any idea that someone might hear it. This whole record felt like a love letter to all the deepest things I love about music. I knew I wanted the opening lines of this song to pair up with the […]

March 5, 2015

Timeless

I wrote this song for Juliette, my grandmother. It was a kind of angry elegy for the five family members we’d lost in a very short amount of time. Nothing prepares you for it. I think I realized I had spent 10 years writing about death as a concept to […]

March 5, 2015

Doesn’t Mean A Thing

Another song in which I still prefer the demo version; in this case it was kind of Wilco-y with an acoustic guitar and piano harmonies. This is about my dad who met mom when he got out of prison, trying to stay clean, how idealistic they were, how hopeful for […]

March 5, 2015

The Kids Are Ready To Die

The first of the two anti-war songs on this record, I think this whole group of songs (you could include The Winning Side and Neda) stemmed from a desire to tell the stories of people at war that weren’t being told at home. We had a lot of vets at […]

March 5, 2015

Welcome to Your Wedding Day

This song is about the two incidents during the war in Afghanistan in which US drones mistakenly bombed Afghani wedding parties. I guess I wanted to say something about the idiocy of trying to win “hearts and minds” with bombs. In retrospect, it seems obvious. The guy screaming during the […]