Katrina Burgoyne: One thing I have learned in the music industry is you are never going to get where you want to be because the target keeps moving. First, you want to make enough money gigging to pay the bills and have a roof over your head and food on the table. Once that happens, you want a record cut. Then you want to go on tour as an opening act. Then you want to be the headliner of your own tour and I don’t think it ever stops. It’s hard for me sometimes but I have to remember that I need to breathe in my day and know that this is right where I’m at today right now, and I’m pretty happy with that and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve achieved and what I’ve done and that I am still on my journey. I’ll tell you the biggest surprise of my journey happened during the pandemic. Now, let me tell you my husband and I had been living together for about a year before the lockdown in 2020 happened. One day he looks at me and said, ‘Katrina, why don’t I start producing your music, while we are in lockdown, and we can get some songs ready for release?’ And I said to him, do you know how to do that? And he’s like, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’ So little did I know that when I would go away on the weekend to play gigs, my husband, who had a corporate job, was recording and making music on his own. So now, Steve is my producer, and we do everything in-house from recording the singles to making the music videos. “One thing I have learned in the music industry is you are never going to get where you want to be because the target keeps moving.”
It wasn’t as ‘easy’ as it sounds. After about a year of gigging, I ended up getting chronically ill with a sinus infection and laryngitis. So, I would gig for about two weeks until my voice would give out. Then I’d have to vocal rest for a couple of weeks before I could sing again, it was a tough time financially. I had $150 left to my name, no voice and no prospect of getting income due to my visa restrictions. I spent it on seeing a doctor to inspect my vocal damage. I must have looked like a stray dog because he offered to donate the operation I needed to get better. This was another life-changing moment for me. I had met my husband about three weeks before I had planned a trip to go back to Australia. He ended up flying out to see me in Australia for a visit we eventually fell in love and have been together ever since. I don’t know if I would have had the strength to do Nashville on my own again. I’m not sure if I
would have flown back. I felt pretty beaten down at the time. But love was a great incentive. When I went back to Nashville, and we started living together, I knew that I found my person, I knew that it just wasn’t me fighting my own battles and that lifted a lot of stress off me, and my health finally got back on track within a few months. Still to this day, I feel like my health problems were from chronic stress and insomnia. I sound really brave for moving countries alone with little funds, but the truth is it was the hardest and scariest thing I have ever done. I’m really proud of that brave girl that got on the plane in Sydney in January 2017. Spotlight on Business: What is the biggest lesson you have learned along the way in your profes- sional journey in front of the camera or behind the mic? What was your biggest surprise?
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FALL/WINTER 2022 • SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE
SPOTLIGHT ON BUSINESS MAGAZINE • FALL/WINTER 2022
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