Katelyn Tarver laughs when you ask her where she was emotionally while making Subject to Change. “Feeling pretty breezy about life,” she says. “Everything was smooth sailing. No issues whatsoever.” It’s a joke, obviously—one that tells you everything you need to know about the record. Subject to Change is tender, funny, quietly devastating, and completely uninterested in pretending everything’s fine.
“I’d been in that place where you start reevaluating everything,” she says. “Am I where I want to be? What even is that? You ask yourself all those heavy, existential questions—and then 2020 hit, and there was nowhere to go but inward.”
So she did. What emerged was an album of surgical honesty wrapped in hushed arrangements—a post-pop confessional for anyone who’s ever mistaken stability for happiness. Tarver doesn’t just explore change; she dissects the fear of it, the inevitability of it, and the small victories buried inside it. “I just decided not to water it down,” she says. “Not to make it more palatable or positive. That felt like the only way forward.”
If the album feels raw, it’s because it is. “The most universal things are usually the most specific,” she says. “If you think you’re the only person feeling something, you’re probably on to something everyone else feels too.” It’s a songwriter’s credo, but also a survival tactic. On Subject to Change, she drops into the intimate details—the friends splitting up, the creeping self-doubt, the morning-after reckoning—and finds something communal hiding inside them.
The line “All our friends are splitting up” hits like a sigh you didn’t know you’d been holding. “That was real,” she says. “You hit your twenties and everyone’s getting married. Then your thirties come and people start breaking up, and suddenly you’re like, wait—who am I still allowed to talk to?” The humor softens the heartbreak. “You realize you’ve been basing your sense of love on other people’s examples,” she adds. “And when those fall apart, it’s disorienting. But maybe that’s okay. Maybe it doesn’t have to mean everything’s terrible.”
That mix of cynicism and grace runs through the record. “Downhill From Here” features the sly line “Stop taking advice from people under 50,” which she swears is only half a joke. “It’s rooted in that moment where you realize adults are just people,” she says. “Nobody knows what they’re doing. Everyone’s figuring it out.”
Musically, Tarver keeps things lean—minimal production, soft pianos, and lyrics so clear they feel whispered directly in your ear. “I wanted the songs to stand on their own,” she says. “Let the lyric be the focal point, let the melody breathe. There’s always that voice in your head going, ‘Is this boring? Is this interesting enough?’ But sometimes taking things out is the most powerful thing you can do.”
It works. The restraint gives the record weight; quiet becomes a kind of defiance. “Hurt Like That” and “Nicer” might seem small at first, but inside the album’s emotional architecture, they bloom. “That was the hope,” she says. “That even the simplest moments would feel big when they had space around them.”
She didn’t know it was going to be an album at first. “When I wrote ‘Downhill From Here,’ something clicked,” she says. “It felt raw, like it needed context. It wasn’t just a single. It was part of a bigger story.” The rest followed quickly: “All Our Friends Are Splitting Up,” “Happens,” “Back to You.” Together, they trace the shape of someone learning to stop expecting life to behave. “I used to believe if you did things right, they’d work out right,” she says. “Turns out that’s not how it goes. There’s grief in that—but there’s also relief.”
The title, Subject to Change, reads like a warning label but feels more like a mantra. “I think I just wanted to make peace with the fact that things don’t stay the same,” she says. “That’s not failure. That’s life.”
Still, she’s not ready to turn the record into a dance party. “I haven’t played these songs live yet,” she says. “I’m figuring out how to do that without losing the intimacy. So no big choreography—unless it’s interpretive dance,” she laughs. “Maybe I’ll get a very solemn dance troupe behind me. That could be a vibe.”
For all its introspection, Subject to Change isn’t a sad record—it’s a self-aware one. Tarver tempers the weight of her lyrics with humor and charm, never letting the melancholy swallow her. “Sometimes I think growing up is just realizing it’s all gray,” she says. “Nothing’s all good or all bad. You can be grateful and still pissed off. You can love someone and still outgrow them. It’s all things at the same time.”
Outside her solo work, she’s been writing for other artists—like Cheryl in the U.K., whose massive hit “Love Made Me Do It” she co-wrote. “That was wild,” she says. “Writing for someone else is like a crash course in ego management. You throw out a line you love, and they’re like, ‘Nope.’ It’s humbling, but it’s good. You have to learn how to get out of the way of the song.”
She’s also part of Reeves, a duo project with her longtime friend Will Anderson of Parachute. “That’s my fun outlet,” she says. “My solo stuff gets pretty heavy—Reeves is like summer camp. It’s nice to share the weight.”
As for the acting career—yes, she’s still taking auditions, but music’s the focus. “It’s front and center right now,” she says. “But I love getting to use different parts of my brain. My brother’s an actor too, so it’s in the family.”
In the end, the whole conversation circles back to that one word: change. “I’m trying to be okay with not knowing what’s next,” she says. “That’s the point, right? You grow, you mess up, you adjust. You keep going.”
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
