Interview: Katie Noir on writing behind a façade to bare her soul –

Katie Noir writes like someone leaving a lamp on inside the rooms most people keep locked. In this A&R Factory interview, the anonymous artist and medical student traces how piano became a private language, how self-taught production gave her the means to build the sounds in her head, and how apology songs for friends gradually became the emotional architecture of her debut album, What Is Unseen Still Exists.

Across the conversation, Katie speaks about friendship, shame, anonymity, medical school and the catharsis of being understood by strangers without giving them her face first. It is a tender, sharply self-aware conversation as much as it as an attestation that unseen feelings can carry the most weight.

You describe music as something that began softly, almost too softly to notice, when you were eleven and first sat at the piano. When did those early lessons stop feeling like notes on keys and start feeling like a language you could trust?

I don’t think there was one dramatic moment where the piano suddenly became a language. It happened almost embarrassingly quietly. I started with a teacher when I was eleven, learning the same things everyone learns, where to put my hands, which key was which, how not to make everything sound like a small accident. But I learned quite quickly, and what fascinated me very early was how much a single key could carry. You could play exactly the same note twice and somehow make it mean something different the second time. Once I understood that, the piano stopped feeling like an instrument I was supposed to operate correctly and started feeling more like somewhere I could put things I didn’t really know how to say.

After a while I began catching up with my teacher, but the funny part was that I was becoming increasingly terrible at doing what piano lessons are technically for, playing other people’s music. I would learn something, get bored with repeating it, change a few notes, wander somewhere else and eventually arrive at a melody that had nothing to do with what we had started with. At first I think my teacher was amused by it. Then I started surprising him more often with melodies of my own. Eventually he told me, essentially, that I didn’t really need him anymore because I had passed the point where he could teach me much. I remember that feeling much less like, “Oh, I’m good at this,” and much more like, “Wait… you’re leaving me alone with all these keys now?”

I think that was when I began trusting music as a language. Not when I could reproduce something perfectly, but when I realised I could sit down without knowing exactly what I wanted to say and my hands would sometimes find it before my words did.

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I love the image of twelve-year-old you making a serious little business proposal for music software. What do you remember about opening that digital audio workstation for the first time and realising you could build the sounds that had only existed in your head?

I remember opening it for the first time and feeling completely overwhelmed. I had this very serious twelve-year-old idea that if I could just get the software, I would finally be able to build everything I was hearing in my head. Then I opened it and immediately realised I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. There were buttons everywhere, windows inside other windows, strange symbols, things moving that I did not understand and somehow every mistake seemed to create three new problems. I think I spent a lot of time clicking things just to find out what they did, which is probably the least elegant form of education imaginable.

But I have always had this slightly stubborn urge to teach myself things before I really know what I am doing. So I kept going. I would try something, ruin it, undo it, try again, accidentally discover something useful, forget how I had done it and then spend another hour trying to recreate it. Slowly, the chaos started making sense. What is funny is that for a very long time I did not know the proper terminology for much of what I was doing. I could hear what I wanted and I could eventually work out how to get there, but if somebody had asked me to explain it technically, I probably would have stared at them very politely.

That is still quite true of how I learn. I usually understand the feeling or the function before I understand the vocabulary. And I think that was the exciting part, the moment I realised I did not need to wait for someone else to translate the sounds in my head for me. Even if it was messy, even if I was learning through trial and error, I could slowly begin building them myself.

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You write beautifully about feeling as though your mind moved differently from the people around you. Did music give you a place where that difference stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling useful?

For a long time, music did not make that difference feel useful. It simply gave me somewhere to put it. Before I ever released anything publicly, I made music entirely for myself. I wrote lyrics almost like diary entries, built the music around them and performed the songs privately because it helped me leave emotions somewhere outside my own head for a while. It was never part of a plan. It was just something that made me feel better.

I think music only started to feel truly useful in a larger sense very recently, when I became public with it at the end of May. That was when I began receiving messages from women who recognised themselves in things I had written. Some of them described feelings that were very familiar to me, but said they had never really known how to put them into words. That changed something for me. Suddenly, the parts of my mind that had sometimes made me feel overly sensitive, complicated or simply a little out of step with everyone else could become material that helped someone else feel understood. And strangely, that has helped me too. Music has become more of an emotional valve than it ever was before. I can take something that feels too large or too messy inside me, turn it into a song and somehow breathe a little easier afterwards.

I probably would have kept all of it private if my friends had not been extremely stubborn about convincing me that I was better at this than I believed myself to be. I resisted that idea for quite a while. They won. So yes, I think music eventually turned that difference into something useful. But it happened backwards. First it helped me survive my own emotions privately. Only later did I realise those same emotions might help somebody else too.

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The album began as apology songs for friends you had hurt by disappearing during a difficult emotional period. Was it frightening to turn those private explanations into something other people could hear and recognise themselves inside?

Yes, absolutely. But strangely, the most frightening part was not showing the songs to my friends. They already knew what had happened. They had lived through the part I was ashamed of. Compared with disappearing on people I cared about, letting them hear the music almost felt less embarrassing. The songs gave me a way to explain myself that I could not manage in a normal conversation. When I tried to talk about what had happened, I would get overwhelmed, lose the thread, minimise things or say something that did not quite match what I actually felt.

In a song, I could stay with the emotion long enough to understand it. I could admit what I had done, why I had done it, how guilty I felt, how much I had missed them and how afraid I was that I had damaged something permanently. So for me, those first apology songs were not really performances. They were a way of finally saying things properly. What became frightening later was the idea that strangers could hear them too, because suddenly something that had belonged to a very small circle of people could be recognised by someone I had never met.

But that also became one of the most meaningful parts of releasing the album. The details were mine, but the emotions were not. Other people knew what it felt like to disappear, to regret it, to love people and still hurt them or to struggle to explain themselves afterwards. I think that was when I realised that something can be deeply private and still belong, emotionally, to many people.

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Various friendships clearly shaped the emotional gravity of the project in different ways. How did those friends change your understanding of love, safety, fear and the power people can have over our emotional weather?

I think they taught me that love and safety are much more complicated than I once thought they were. The strange thing about feeling truly safe with someone is that it also makes you vulnerable. If somebody becomes important enough to make your world feel calmer simply by being there, suddenly their absence can affect you too. I learned that the people who make us feel safest can also frighten us the most, simply because suddenly there is something important enough to lose. Lisa, Lexi and Sara have all taught me different versions of that.

With Lisa, I think I learned the contradiction between safety and fear most intensely. She can make me feel incredibly safe, but because that safety matters so much to me, the possibility of losing it can become frightening very quickly. That taught me something uncomfortable about myself too, sometimes fear is not evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it is simply evidence that I care very deeply.

Lexi taught me that love does not always have to speak exactly the same emotional language as I do. I can be quite intense, I am sure this interview has hidden that extremely well so far. But people can love you deeply without expressing it in precisely the way you would. Learning to recognise someone else’s language of loyalty instead of constantly translating it into my own has been important for me.

And Sara taught me a lot about calm. Some people do not need to fix your emotional weather or even fully understand every storm inside you. Sometimes their steadiness is enough. They stay in the room while it is raining.

But I think the biggest lesson has been that loving someone deeply does not make them responsible for regulating everything I feel. The album documents moments when I was not always very good at understanding that distinction. Other people can affect our emotional weather enormously, especially when we love them, but they cannot be expected to become our entire climate. Maybe that is what these friendships have taught me most, safety is not the absence of fear and love is not perfect emotional understanding. Sometimes it is simply knowing that you can be complicated, frightened, difficult or overwhelmed and there are still people willing to find their way back to you.

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What Is Unseen Still Exists is such a powerful title with its ability to push back against the idea that only visible things matter. What did that phrase unlock for you when Lisa suggested it?

The funny thing is that Lisa did not actually invent the phrase. She just understood what it was before I did. I had been using a version of “What is unseen still exists” next to my name in an online status for quite a while. The idea goes back even further, to when I was younger and first came across Plato’s Theory of Forms. I became fascinated by the thought that something does not have to be physically visible in order to be real. That stayed with me. Feelings are like that. Love is like that. Grief, memory, hope, loneliness, friendship, none of those things have to be visible from the outside to completely shape a person’s life.

So I carried the phrase around without really thinking of it as anything more than a small personal statement. Then, when the idea of the album was already beginning to take shape, Lisa literally said, that phrase is your album title. And I had one of those slightly embarrassing moments where someone points out something that suddenly feels painfully obvious. She was completely right. Once she said it, the whole project clicked into place. I started seeing the album much more clearly as one connected idea rather than simply a collection of personal songs. Suddenly there was a thread running through everything, the emotions people do not see, the friendships outsiders cannot fully understand, the private battles nobody notices, the memories that still influence us even when the moment itself is long gone.

After that, I leaned into the concept much more deliberately. It became the red thread through the album. So I think what Lisa really unlocked was not the phrase itself. She unlocked my understanding of what I had already been writing. And yes, I did feel a little stupid that I had been carrying my own album title around next to my name for so long without noticing it.

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You are approaching the end of your first year of medical school while also making music as Katie Noir. Do you feel that medicine and songwriting both come from the same desire to understand what hurts and make people feel less alone?

I think they probably do come from the same place, even though they look completely different from the outside. Medicine is very concrete. It asks you to study carefully, be precise, take responsibility and learn how to help someone in a way that is practical and real. Music is almost the opposite for me. It is instinctive, emotional and much harder to measure. But both require the same kind of attention, you have to look closely at another human being, or at yourself and resist the temptation to look away when something becomes difficult.

I think I have always been drawn to that question of how people can be helped, even if the answer takes completely different forms. With medicine, I am learning how to help with knowledge and with my hands. With music, I try to reach the parts of people that cannot really be touched that way. So maybe that is the balance I have accidentally created for myself, by day, I am learning how to help people with my hands. At night, I try to reach them with my words.

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You remain anonymous, but the songs are always unflinchingly honest. What does the Katie Noir identity allow you to say that might feel too exposed if every part of your private life was placed under a spotlight?

Katie Noir gives me freedom, but if I am completely honest, anonymity is also self-protection. There is the artistic reason, of course. Because my face and private identity are not the centre of the project, I can be much more honest in the songs. I can write about fear, shame, friendship, attraction, mistakes and things I would probably say different or much more carefully if every lyric immediately became attached to my face.

But there is also a much less poetic reason, I am a medical student. My life is not only lectures and exams. There are days when I am in hospitals, around patients, learning how to enter spaces where somebody else may be frightened, vulnerable or in pain. In those moments, I do not want to walk into the room as “Katie Noir.” I want to be the medical student who is there to learn, listen and help.

If my face became widely recognisable, those two worlds could start colliding in ways I cannot fully control. A patient recognising me from a song, somebody filming me or people becoming interested in my private life while I am trying to work in a clinical environment would be uncomfortable for me, but more importantly, it could distract from a place that should never be about me.

So anonymity protects that separation. It also protects the people I write about. My songs can be deeply personal without requiring everyone connected to my life to become public with me. I know anonymity makes some parts of being an artist more difficult. Visibility would probably make promotion easier. But I would rather accept that disadvantage and keep a part of my life that still belongs only to me. Katie Noir is not a character I hide behind. She is genuinely me. I just want people to know my inner world before they know my face.

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Interview by Amelia Vandergast