Today we’d like to introduce you to KOLI.
Hi KOLI, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I started playing music really young. Musical family translated to playing covers for my friends in middle school, and then writing some of my own in high school.
The love of music took me to Belmont University in Nashville for a music business degree, which is where the path started to deviate from “linear”. I left college for a while, got sober at 19, and during that time I started doing vocals for electronic and hip-hop artists. When I went back to school, I found alternative rock, kept writing, played keys in other people’s bands upon graduation, started doing writers’ rounds, and between the ups and downs of my late teens and early 20s fell in love with the art of songwriting.
Songwriting is my first love. It’s my world. It’s the thing that wakes me up every morning. Even when I wasn’t actively pursuing an artist career, I was always writing.
Somewhere along the way, I think I got a little lost. Rather than sit in my lostness, I went to law school for entertainment law, which I lovingly refer to as my quarter-life crisis.
But I never stopped making music. I wrote and recorded my first project, Exit Wounds, while I was in law school and released it the day I graduated. Since then, I’ve transitioned pretty heavily into folk and singer-songwriter music, which is where most of what I’m making now lives.
So that’s really where I am now. After years of circling around it, I’m finally giving this a real shot. I’ve spent a lot of years making music while building a life around other things, and I think I’m finally ready to see what happens when I stop doing that.
I think that’s also a big part of why I’m doing this now. I spent a lot of time waiting for permission in my own life, or convincing myself that the practical choice was somehow more valid than the thing I actually wanted. And I know I’m not the only person who does that.
If there’s a bigger purpose behind KOLI, I think it’s just to give people that extra little push to choose themselves. To change their mind. Start over. Make the weird choice. Take the thing they love seriously. Whatever it is. You don’t actually need anyone’s permission, but sometimes it helps to have someone remind you of that.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Definitely not, but I also don’t know that I would want it to have been.
I think one of my biggest struggles has been myself. I spent a lot of years taking music seriously enough to keep doing it, but not seriously enough to fully bet on myself. There was always something more practical I could be doing, another degree, another job, another reason that now wasn’t the right time.
I’ve also had to start over a lot. I got sober at 19, left school and came back, moved across the country more than once, went to law school, changed genres, changed directions, and had plenty of moments where I had absolutely no idea what I was doing with my life.
And then there’s the less romantic side of being an independent artist. You’re not just writing songs. You’re booking shows, making content, figuring out marketing, paying for recordings, building a band, answering emails, trying to get people to listen, and somehow still finding enough quiet in your brain to actually make something honest.
I think the biggest thing I’ve learned through all of it is that clarity doesn’t always come before you make the decision. Sometimes you make the decision and clarity catches up. I’m still figuring a lot of it out, but I’m much more comfortable with that than I used to be.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Everything I write begins with nothing but a pen and a piano. I don’t co-write, so every song starts there. I’m a singer-songwriter making mostly folk/pop/indie music, and I tend to write feelings more than I write stories. I’m interested in capturing a really specific emotional state. The things that are hard to explain but immediately recognizable when you hear them.
There are stories behind the songs, but they aren’t always obvious. My first project, Exit Wounds, is about my decision to leave Nashville for Los Angeles rather than stick around and find out what another two years in Nashville might have looked like. But you probably wouldn’t know that just from listening to it. I’m less interested in telling you exactly what happened than I am in capturing what it felt like.
Exit Wounds came out in 2025, and I’m probably most proud of the fact that I made it at all. I wrote and recorded the entire project while I was in law school and released it the day I graduated. Music was technically the thing I was doing “on the side,” but apparently I wasn’t very good at putting it to the side.
I think what sets me apart is how personal the process still is. There aren’t co-writers or writing rooms behind the songs. They start with me, a piano and usually a pen, and then I build the world around them from there.
I’ve also lived a lot of different lives. I’m an artist, but I’m also an attorney, a yoga teacher and a hypnotherapist. I think all of those things have made me really curious about people… why we do what we do, what we carry around with us, what we avoid, what we want… and naturally, that finds its way into the music.
What are your plans for the future?
The biggest change is really already happening. For the first time, I’m treating music like my career instead of something I have to fit around the rest of my life.
I’m writing constantly right now and working on a lot of new music. We have about an albums worth of material on a hard drive and I cannot wait to release it this fall. I also want to play a lot more shows. There’s something about playing these songs in a room with actual people that you just can’t replicate online.
Beyond releases and shows, I’m really focused on building KOLI into something bigger than just putting songs on Spotify and hoping people find them. I want to build a real community around the music and the ideas behind it.
For a long time I had a very clear idea of what the “responsible” version of my life was supposed to look like. Right now, I’m much more interested in seeing what happens when I give the thing I actually love the majority of my attention. So the plan is pretty simple: write more, release more, play more.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://iamkoli.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamkoli/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IAMKOLIMUSIC
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2VI1euNiRJVoP9OyS6RWcg
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/album/0xEIAY5xuHfgBhi74OQqZ0?si=xpWcM7gTQWegCRfF8A3Rmg
