Name 3 Songs: So you’ve been pursuing a career in the music industry since you were a teenager. You’ve been releasing music since 2011 and you were on Nickelodeon’s Big Time Rush, and there’s this idea with the entertainment industry that it can be like super cutthroat. And it’s really impressive when we see people who continue pursuing the passion and the dream. What has it been like going from navigating this as a young person to continue doing it now?

Katelyn Tarver: Yeah I feel like I lucked out in the sense that I was child star-adjacent. Like I had success as a teen and a young 20 year-old, but it wasn’t overwhelming to the point where I was in that machine of an unrelenting schedule and all these eyes on you at such a young age. 

I got a little taste of that enough to kind of mess with my psyche, but not enough to have a ton of trauma from it, which I’m thankful for. In that sense, I was able to develop my taste and my skills and get better outside of too much public attention, which is probably the reason I’m still doing it. 

I’ve become really thankful for my trajectory, and being able to have these moments of discovery and growth at a little bit of an older age, because I feel like I have more to say. I had nothing to say when I was like 19. What am I gonna talk about at 19? I don’t know. 

I’ve had my moments of being down on myself, but I also am starting to really be thankful for it too.

Your album Quitter comes out February 9, and the title track “Quitter” has this lyric that’s really powerful – “Will you still love me if my luck runs out?” And whether or not you’re pursuing a career related to stardom, that’s something a lot of people can feel throughout their lifetime. Like, am I valuable to a certain degree? And then as you’re growing and as you’re changing as a person, it’s like, are the people who listened to my music five years ago still going to care about me now and what I’m doing now?

Totally. Yeah, it’s all about that fear of like, where is my worth as a human being coming from? And realizing even though I am aware of this idea, I’m more than just my career success or lack thereof. When you really are having to ask yourself, do you actually believe that? Like, could you never release a song again or choose to do something else with my life? And I had all these feelings come up around that. 

So much of my worth comes from doing this as a job and like getting recognition or wanting it or chasing after it. And it [a realization that] I need to work on that. Because life is long. It takes a lot of different twists and turns. I don’t know where I’m going to end up. It kind of helped open my eyes. I guess work I needed to do on myself to get to a place where I was good, and I am me no matter what comes and goes.