QSC Aspiring Interview: St Catherine’s Child on channelling grief into her debut album ‘This Might Affect You’

Transatlantic Americana and indie-folk artist St Catherine’s Child is an alchemist; taking the drawn-out loss of her father to cancer, she has transformed her grief into her debut album This Might Affect You. Raised in Connecticut, she now forms part of the rich musical tapestry of Liverpool. She speaks to Headliner about signing with the legendary TRO Essex label, and how she successfully created an album about loss that is somehow an uplifting experience to listen to.

Born in England, Ilana Zsigmond to musical parents, she spent most of her younger years in New Haven, while flitting between the US and the UK. Zsigmond ultimately relocated to the UK in 2015, where she began forming a band to perform her own take on the Americana music that accompanied her throughout her childhood. She adopted her artist name as a nod to the patron saint of women, and her debut single Burden arrived in 2020, approaching four million streams on Spotify alone at the time of writing.

“I grew up around music,” Zsigmond says of her upbringing. “My mum was a singer and my dad was a guitar player. My mother was making records around me, and I was a five-year-old asleep on the studio couch while everyone was making a record. Every adopted aunt and uncle that we had played different instruments and were in bands with my parents.

“Ironically, I didn’t see it as a career for a long time. If my parents were accountants, I would have said, ‘I don't want to do what my parents do.’ I wanted to be a writer of prose and go into books and TV. I went to uni for English literature, and as I was there, I realised all my friends are musicians, and I was gigging pretty much every night. It’s as though my genetics moved me against my will; I found myself a musician.”

In terms of now being a Liverpudlian, she says, “Oh my gosh, it's such a great city to live in as a musician. My parents lived here for a long time. My dad was a session player here, so loads of people in the generation up from our community were his. There are loads of people who knew him that I bump into. As a musician, Liverpool is like being a kid in a candy store. Everybody is a world-class session player. Everybody has something to teach you in the best way. And because it's such a saturated city, in order to get booked, you also have to be really nice, because there's no time for people who aren't. There's just no bad eggs; you not only have to be good, but you also have to be easy to work with, and it means that it's a really safe and supportive city full of beautiful people. I'm evangelical about Liverpool.”

It’s quite something for your debut single to become your most successful release when there are many artists that dabble with the thought of deleting their first single from the public record. But that is the case with Burden, not far from hitting four million streams on Spotify alone. It’s an excellent showcase of what Zsigmond brings to the world, an indie-folk ballad with tasteful touches of Americana, rather than shoving the genre’s sounds and instrumentation down the listener’s throat like many artists do. The very full instrumentation blends harmoniously with her vocals, which are both soulful and powerful.

“I had a couple of other little EPs out for a long time under my other artist name,” she says. “We recorded those at my university studios on a whim. And in hindsight, they're really cute, but not very professional. Burden was the first time I hired a studio to do it, and I was calling the shots with a producer. And then it got picked up by a Spotify playlist out of my control, and developed this life of its own, which has been really amazing. The ‘60s, ‘70s sound, it's just Simon & Garfunkel, isn't it? I remember at the time thinking I didn't want to overcomplicate it. I just wanted to write the song that was in my head. And what was in my head was simple and referential. It holds a really special place in my heart because it really did show me how far things could go.”

Zsigmond is signed to Shamus Records, a subsidiary of the legendary TRO Essex music publishing organisation. This places her in a very special musical lineage, with TRO publishing the likes of The Who, T. Rex, Pink Floyd, and Black Sabbath throughout the years.

“Every time I interact with anything that they've done, it blows my mind,” she says. I don't think I can ever know everything that's in that catalogue. It's incredible. I met them at the Folk Alliance, the folk conference, when it was in Kansas City. It’s a funny event: you play in empty hotel rooms up until three in the morning and unplugged, and people just wander in and out. It's like a university dorm room jam session but for four straight days and across the whole hotel. And by sheer coincidence, Brian, who worked in TRO Essex’s A&R department, happened to wander into my room. It was very serendipitous. The strangest thing about it is that I had the album pretty much written at that point, but not recorded. The album's about the loss of my dad, and my dad's favourite artists of all time were signed to Essex Music. T. Rex was his favourite thing in the world.”

As she touched upon, the debut St Catherine’s Child album deals with losing her father. The first half of the album deals with the time during his illness, while the second reflects on dealing with the loss and the associated trauma.

From the first half of This Might Affect You is The Other Side of Twenty Five — a perfect example of why this album is not the downbeat record it might sound like at face value. Zsigmond sings over a guitar riff with the perfect amount of overdrive that the song calls for. The pop synth line in the chorus confirms this is a bop rather than a song to necessarily cry your eyes out to.

Zsigmond confirms this, saying, “I said on day one of recording to Alec Glover, who produced the album with me, ‘I need this to be affecting, but not depressing. I don't want to ruin anybody's day.’ That song was ironically inspired by Cheryl Crow's All I Wanna Do. I thought that was a really fun and funny reference, and one of my favourites.” 

In honour of her father, This Might Affect You came out on Father’s Day 2025, which by sheer coincidence also fell on what would have been his birthday this year. Zsigmond talks about how making this album helped her process everything, and how she’s feeling now that it’s out there in the world.

“As soon as I saw that coincidence of those dates falling together, I said that's the day the record comes out. I miss him a ton, and I know that he'd love it, and he'd be so delighted that my master tapes are next to T. Rex's. He'd think that's really fun. My family have been really supportive and lovely. I'm trying to figure out how to go about marketing it on the internet without cheapening the content, which is going to be an adventure. But I feel like it did its job when I started writing it; I changed overnight when I started making this record. It took something that felt so senseless and so tragic and gave me something to do with all that, even if in such a small way, but in such a meaningful way. I'm excited to start writing again. I haven't written about anything besides my dad in years. Maybe the next record will be about something bonkers and strange.”

In terms of what the phrase ‘Play Out Loud’ means to her, Zsigmond says: “I think the St Catherine band name sums it up for me. The idea that 1000 years ago she was inspiring women to speak their minds and be independent, and I put her at the front of everything I do. I have her wheel tattooed on my arm. For me, it means there is absolutely no point in art that isn't completely authentic. People can smell it, and I think we have a natural ability to sense the uncanny valley and those things. I'm only interested in making art that feels like cracking your back at the end of a long day. If it's not satisfying for me, if it's not honest or truthful, there’s no point.”

The debut St Catherine’s Child album is out now, and as the title suggests, it really might affect you. But in the sense of being uplifting and the musical joy that is the shared human experience. Whatever forms the subject matter for her next record, there’s no doubt that this is a songwriter and artist to watch with great interest.