Katie Herzig is well aware that her belief in mystical coincidences might be a step too far for more logical folks. She’s even still figuring out how to explain it.
But when it comes to Grey’s Anatomy, she can still recall a moment of synchronicity so profound and seemingly out of nowhere that it’s hard to categorize it as anything but mystical. It was 2011, and Herzig’s mother had just passed away. Hard at work on a music video, Herzig stopped by a fabric store to pick up some material.
“I was looking at the woman’s hand cutting the sheet, and it reminded me of my mom’s hands,” she says. “And then, the one song [my mom] knew how to play on piano started playing on the overhead speaker. This is crazy, but then I came home, and my TV was on, and Grey’s Anatomy was on. It was the episode that featured my song ‘Lost and Found.’ It was just a bunch of sparkly dust surrounding that time.”
It’s those moments of awakening and magic that inform Herzig’s music, which over the years has ranged from gentle folk to cinematic dream pop — all anchored by a breathless delivery that feels like she’s sharing a secret. It’s a vulnerable mix, one that led her to garner an impressive 11 song placements across six seasons of Grey’s Anatomy.
But the first time Herzig’s music was featured on the medical series in 2007, she was a bit dubious. She’d played in bands in Colorado before moving to Nashville, so it wasn’t the first time she heard her music on TV. Well, sort of heard. “I learned a lesson about telling everyone, and then you couldn’t even hear the song on the show!” she laughs.
But she knew she was on the right path. She was still hungry for TV placements, and her manager had a relationship with Secret Road, a music-licensing company. And in another moment of mystical coincidence, Herzig woke up one morning to the sound of someone — or perhaps something — saying the owner’s name.
“That never happened to me in my life!” she recalls. “So, I told my manager, ‘We need to follow up with her. I’d like to work with her!’ Not long after that, she called me to say I got a placement in Grey’s.”
Even so, Herzig was shocked to discover that her airy folk song “Sweeter Than This” was such a natural fit for a scene featuring Derek Shepherd and Mark Sloan walking through a forest on Derek’s land in a classic McDreamy and McSteamy brotherhood moment.
Her Grey’s Anatomy moments didn’t stop there. Herzig’s music kept viewers company during shifting friendships, daring surgeries, and the unforgettable scene when bereaved husband Gary Clark pulls the trigger and shoots Derek on the catwalk while Meredith helplessly screams.
These musical moments are fresh in her mind thanks to a generous fan who approached Herzig while she was opening for Brandi Carlile and gifted her with a meticulously recorded DVD of all her song placements on television.
“I went to the attic and dug it out yesterday,” she says. “Oh, my god, when I got to the Grey’s section, it was distinctly different. All the placements were so long and juicy and emotional. They were so generous with the placements; it felt like a lot of things were coming to fruition. I was sitting there crying on my couch, even though I didn’t know exactly what was going on in the show.”
As Herzig explains, there’s something mesmerizing about immortalizing the snapshots of her life in song — only to see them score another story instead.
“There’s always more life out there to a song than you realize,” she says. “So many life experiences beyond the seed of the song. There’s nothing more satisfying to me than writing something that was a specific experience of mine, and then it being put with other stories. It brings it to life in a whole new way.”
It’s that openness that Herzig hopes to bring to her next album, due out later this year. She calls the last few years her “cave time,” when she married fellow musician Butterfly Boucher and did a fair amount of deep thinking — some of which has directly inspired her work as a musician and will surely impact her upcoming album. She’s hesitant to say too much while she’s still in the final process of creation.
“This is an album that I intentionally made completely on my own,” she says. “Metaphorically, I feel like I went into a cave and did all this inner work. I didn’t realize how hard it is to come out of the cave. I love the time it has taken me to make this project. I feel like it’s something that invites you into a more reflective state. … It has a freshness to it, like I’m doing something new that I haven’t done before, even though I have released many albums. There’s something that feels like I’m a baby at it.”
But even as Herzig enters this new era, she’s unconcerned about what the reaction may be because she knows there’ll be plenty of sparks and moments of synchronized history to light her way.