Kate Bollinger

Kate Bollinger grew up in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her mother was a music therapist, and her two older brothers played in local bands. As a child, she sang in the Ash Lawn Opera every summer and began writing songs. In 2011, her brother Will recorded a song of hers, and she uploaded it to SoundCloud. From then on, she made primitive home recordings, which she released online and burned to CDs for her friends. In high school, she spent two summers studying songwriting at Young Writers Workshop and played her first show opening for her former songwriting teacher, Gene Osborne. Serendipitously, the other act on the bill was her all-time favorite band, Philly-based, The Extraordinaires. They kept in touch, and she went to Philadelphia the following year to record her first EP, Key West, with The Extraordinaires as her backing band. By college, while studying poetry and cinematography, she continued to self-release folk-pop songs to the attention of The New York Times and NPR. After years of playing and recording in solitude, Bollinger formed a band to record her EP, I Don’t Wanna Lose, followed by the 2020 EP, A word becomes a sound. She made her Ghostly International debut in 2022 with Look at it in the Light, a six-song collection that saw her building out the project’s sound and visual scope, including a series of collaborative music videos. Since moving to Los Angeles, Bollinger has split time between recording new material, contributing to friends’ projects (Drugdealer, Paul Cherry), and touring (with Faye Webster, Tennis, and others). She’s released several standalone singles through 2023 and continues to tour as her debut album takes shape.