Katie Bejsiuk (fka Free Cake For Every Creature) announces her debut album under her new moniker, The Woman on the Moon, out June 27th on Double Double Whammy. Along with the album announcement she has shared the album’s lead single, “Onion Grass,” which Katie says was “inspired by the rupture of an adolescent friendship, which occurred as we moved from the imaginative space of childhood to the restrictive and gendered structures of young adulthood.” Clean acoustic strumming gradually gets louder and more dissonant with the addition of electric guitar, mimicking the tumultuous journey of growing up, while Katie invokes a prayer for small natural wonders and innocence. 

The name Bejsiuk is the singer-songwriter’s original surname: her father, a first generation American with parents from Ukraine, changed it before she was born. By reclaiming the name for her solo project, the first new music we’ve heard from Katie since Free Cake disbanded in 2019, she has conjoined with a shadow version of herself who holds hands with her past, present, and future. And with the release of her debut album listeners are offered the most wholly version of Katie yet.

Katie Bennett, singer-songwriter behind the bygone indie pop band Free Cake For Every Creature, spent the last three years exploring what it means to be her. She looked into the mirror and then she stepped into it; extended her arms forward, reached for the hands that reached back, and came together whole as Katie Bejsiuk. 

The Woman on the Moon gently nods to the pre-band days of Free Cake—when it was just Katie and her guitar—but with a musical evolution cultivated from years of self-inquiry during which her confidence, direction, and self-possession bloomed. Whereas Free Cake buoyantly focused on the ecstatic wonders and wounds of youth in real time, Katie Bejsiuk pans out with wisdom and retrospection that comes with age. The Woman on the Moon is composed of 12 exquisite and refined songs that evoke the sensory through introspective lyrics and salve the heart with Katie’s tranquilizing, cadenced vocals that devoted fans have clung to for over a decade.

Photo Courtesy: Rivkah Gevinson