Though she’s been releasing songs online as Pacing since 2019, Katie McTigue had never played those songs onstage until 2023. That year was noteworthy for Pacing, and the album Real Poetry Is Always About Plants and Birds and Trees and the Animals and Milk and Honey Breathing in the Pink But Real Life Is Behind a Screen celebrates its one-year anniversary this month.
Pacing will play through the album’s entirety at its anniversary and vinyl release show at Jade Cathay on Oct. 13, joined by Career Woman, Walk the Whale and Christian Francisco.
The Florida-born singer/songwriter started out by collaborating with people on Reddit. “I didn’t wanna be, like, an artist,” McTigue says. “I wanted to be a pop songwriter. One day I was at Rite Aid and I heard a Justin Bieber song that was so stupid, and just went, I think I can do better. How do I write songs and then pitch them to Carrie Underwood?”
McTigue moved from Pittsburgh to the South Bay in 2022, and soon fell in with San Jose’s steadfast DIY music scene. After seeing a few local concerts curated by promoter Heavy Lemon, it didn’t take long for McTigue to get involved—not only performing but also running Heavy Lemon’s social media.
Heavy Lemon came on the scene in 2022, when lifelong Bay Area resident Chris Gough started booking artists to play in San Jose after years of playing in punk bands.
The scene has an illustrious history over the last decade of booking shows in oddball venues—from video game stores to sex shops—and Heavy Lemon continued this tradition by reaching out to local restaurant Jade Cathay.
“It started when our friend Sharon introduced the manager, Mandy, to me because they were looking for new ways to get people in the restaurant. Mandy had a cousin in Hong Kong who had started doing shows in their restaurant, selling food and clothes during the show. That gave her the inspiration to try it out at Jade Cathay,” Gough says.
The restaurant suffered a decline in lunchtime traffic after several post-pandemic office closures in the neighborhood, Gough says, and Heavy Lemon shows brought a clientele boost in the form of hungry punk rockers looking to scarf down some shu mai between sets.
“The internet and real life just have a way of coming together,” says McTigue, recalling how she met Gough through Aaron Kovacks, founder of the Southern California based label Lauren Records.
Blooming from an online bud into an onstage flower took work. “I had to learn all the songs,” the artist laughs—many of which she had recorded almost immediately after writing and has not played since.
McTigue has developed a unique mix of editing techniques over the years of home recording, often splicing and stitching pieces of a song together as she writes it. She used this process for the album’s second single, “Annoying Email,” which sets everyone’s least favorite work correspondence phrases (“we can circle back whenever you have the time”) to a looping, earwormy melody.
Other tracks were recorded more traditionally, while still playful and exploratory at their core. “Attic/Ghostbusters,” a passive-aggressive haunted house ballad, features piano––an instrument McTigue did not know how to play (she simply picked out the notes one by one on the recording).
Playing alongside other local bands has influenced Pacing’s sound as well—most notably by the addition of bandmates Joe Sherman on drums and Ben Krock on bass and guitar. “It’s pretty punk here!” McTigue says of the local scene, laughing. “I wanna be punk too!”
Pacing has also joined San Jose’s own legendary punk and indie label Asian Man Records, headed by DIY veteran Mike Park. Park and McTigue announced the signing last week with a goofy video filmed at the Los Gatos McDonald’s—down the street from Pirate Cat Radio (KPCR), where McTigue was a guest on Park’s radio show in September.
Pacing’s verbose album title declares that “real life is behind a screen,” a sardonic nod to how Internet addiction can overtake our day-to-day reality. In a funny case of life imitating art, this has manifested inversely for McTigue’s musical career—transforming a digital experience of the world into three-dimensional living flesh.
Pacing plays at 7pm Oct. 13 at Jade Cathay, 1339 N 1st St, San Jose. Tickets: $10+ For more info, follow on Instagram (heavylemonsj) or visit sites.google.com/view/heavylemonsj.
