On 34-year-old singer/songwriter Katelyn Tarver’s new album, Quitter, she sings about what her life could have looked like if she decided to quit pursuing a career in the entertainment industry, daydreaming about seeing a movie and Googling the childhood actress to see where she ended up. It turns out, she went to college and moved to Missouri, never to be seen or heard from again.
If you aren’t familiar with Tarver, she could have very well ended up being that childhood actress who moved to the midwest to pursue a sense of normalcy. From 2010-2013, Tarver starred in the Nickelodeon show Big Time Rush, leading to other roles in television shows like No Ordinary Family, The Secret Life Of The American Teenager, and Ballers. During those years, she also continued to pursue music, releasing several singles, EPs, and appearing on a number of tracks as a featured artist, eventually dropping her debut album Subject To Change back in 2021. She’s also had several songwriting credits for artists like Old Dominion, Jake Scott, and Joshua Bassett.
In honor of the new album, Quitter, dropping on Friday, February 9, Tarver played two shows in New York City and Los Angeles, the ladder just two days before Quitter was released. The Wednesday evening show was an intimate affair, hosted at Hollywood’s Hotel Cafe Main Room, landing on the tail end of a four-day rainstorm across Los Angeles that resulted in flooding of several neighborhoods and even resulting in severe damage. But the dreary weather didn’t stop the show from packing the attendees in: the 200-capacity room was filled to the brim: many fans showed up early for a pre-show meet and greet and to snag the best seats in the house.
At 8 o’clock on the dot, Tarver hit the stage with just a guitarist to accompany her, as she opened the set with the title track, “Quitter,” which eventually was described by Tarver as “what it means to live your life the way you want to.”
“Call me a defeatist, call me good at leavin’ / I’m just done with feeling bad all the time / It’s kinda nice to be a quitter / I kinda like being a quitter”
Folk duo Johnnyswim made an appearance to perform a song with Tarver, reminiscing on their time touring together and spending time together (safely) during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The surprise guests didn’t stop there, though: Amanda Tarver, Katelyn’s sister, also had a moment onstage to sing “When I Leave Home” with Tarver, a song off of Subject To Change that describes the conflicting feelings of returning home again and wanting to go back to your life, but also feeling sad that the trip is coming to an end.
And one more guest brought loud claps from the crowd: Big Time Rush’s Kendall Schmidt, who sang a lovely rendition of Paramore’s “The Only Exception” with Tarver, who released the song as a cover back in 2022.
My favorite moments came during a heart wrenching performance of my personal favorite track off of Quitter, “Starting To Scare Me,” an incredibly vulnerable song about what it feels to spiral into a state of indifference to everything in your life, and “Friend Like You,” an ode to platonic relationships and the friendships that last a lifetime. This garnered a lovely moment from the crowd as Tarver encouraged members to hug each other.
Quitter is a solid, cohesive album that delves into the nuances of coming to terms with knowing you’ll never fully come to terms. That we actually don’t know anything at all, and we’ll never know what would have happened if we headed in the other direction at the fork in the road of life, but accepting that it’s okay. That it’s important to ask questions we’ll never get the answers to, and just how warranted it is to find good in every day, and that the only thing constant is that things change every day.
Quitter is out now.
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