We recently connected with Natalie Kılıç and have shared our conversation below.

Natalie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

In 2023, I went to four funerals.

I’m not a stranger to grief and loss, but that year it kept sucker punching me in the gut to the point I wasn’t sure I would ever get up. Whenever I thought I saw the light, something would be there to knock me back down again, as though to tell me I should stay at rock bottom. It didn’t stop at death– everything in my life turned upside down in a way I never imagined. All I could do was sit in the pain, and write.

I only started releasing my music in 2022, terrified of how people would receive it. It felt really intimidating to put an entire project together, so I tried not to think about it too much. In 2023 I wanted to let myself create freely, and get used to the idea of letting people into my world, without any of the pressure of trying to put a conceptual wrapper around it. The songs that stood out to me that year, at least lyrically, all felt really serious and sad. A reflection of the state I was in.

In September 2023, I wrote a song called Free Man– the day my grandfather passed. It’s the easiest song I’ve ever written, as though his spirit was in the room with me writing it. He had suffered for a long time, so there was a bit of peace in knowing he was no longer in pain. I wrote the song in an hour, sobbing through my scratch vocals, and never touched the lyrics again.

Strangely, after his passing, things started to get better. I started to see the benefits of the time I spent sitting in my pain and really trying to work through it. The songs I wrote that year all came from a place of necessity. I had to write them in order to release what I was feeling. All of a sudden, I had a group of songs I was really proud of, and I didn’t ever feel the pressure of coming up with some profound conceptual wrapper. It just came together.

At the end of 2024, I released my debut EP Heartbreak Meditation Center. A collection of painful moments, but my personal proof that sitting with them can get you through them.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Natalie Kılıç, I’m a Brooklyn-based alternative pop artist. My music is a blend of pop, folk and electronic influences, often compared to artists like BANKS, beabadoobee, and The Japanese House.
I’ve been writing since I was six, but I didn’t begin pursuing my music in earnest until my mid-20s. It always felt like something that was out of reach for people like me– I grew up in a big family that put little emphasis on creative pursuits, and didn’t particularly encourage emotional expression. But I had some aggressive PTSD from early childhood that needed to be put somewhere, so in my lyric journal they quietly went.
After years of the little voice in my head gnawing at me incessantly, I decided to start investing in my music seriously. Since then it’s been a whirlwind– a lot of scary decisions that have led to so much creative and personal fulfillment. My music seems to resonate with people who have had similar life experiences, and who have held themselves back out of fear or pain. I hope it continues speaking to those people.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

When I was just 3 years old, my mother took me and my four siblings to Istanbul, to spend time with my father’s side of the family. We were staying on the top floor of my grandparents’ condo, about 30 miles outside of the city.

A few days in, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck, killing over 17,000 people– including my four siblings and paternal grandparents. My first memory is waking up under the rubble, where I was trapped for 36 hours before being recovered.
I’ve always felt fear around sharing my story… not everyone has taken it well, and some haven’t even believed me at all. To an extent, I understand. It’s a hard story to stomach. But hearing my story mistold and misinterpreted so much early in life has made me terrified to share it, and with it all of my other stories.

When I feel fear (and I feel it often), I feel it deep in my bones, as though I’m the same little girl wondering if she would ever be pulled out. It was always easy to write my music in secret, but I found it nearly impossible to push past that stage. I think my resiliency is demonstrated in the sheer act of releasing music, but I think it’s a universal resiliency artists have to build. Some just find it easier than others.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

When first releasing music, one thing that held me back was the feeling that I was too far behind to get anywhere. I felt unprepared, and that because I hadn’t spent most of my life learning classical guitar or piano or whatever-the-fuck, I’d never be respected.

I’ve found my experience to be the opposite, in many ways.

Experience doesn’t always come with a degree, particularly in the arts. Through years of scribbling lyrics in my journal, I had unknowingly been preparing myself for these moments.

Once I broke out of the limiting belief that I’m not prepared, my world opened up. Today, I work with artists I never dreamed would want to work with me. Learning the technical has been immensely helpful, but was never the barrier I thought it was.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nataliekilic/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/nataliek12345
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nataliekilic

Image Credits

Brianna Saba
Dave Friedman