Kate Nauta is living proof of music’s power to transform intense heartbreak into hope. On her forthcoming full-length debut Love, Loss + Recovery—an album created soon after the death of her beloved older brother—the New York-based singer/songwriter brings her stunning vocals to a selection of songs both emotionally raw and beautifully nuanced. Built on her soul-baring storytelling and fearless reflection, the result is a body of work that promises pure catharsis and possibly even a life-changing shift in perspective.
Although Love, Loss + Recovery stems from a lifetime of devotion to music, Nauta’s creative urge took on a new ferocity following her brother Josh’s death in fall 2017. “The last time I ever talked to Josh, he made me promise over and over that I would put my music out into the world,” says Nauta, whose brother succumbed to brain cancer after a longtime battle with addiction. “It was almost as if he knew something I didn’t know—like, ‘You’ve got to do this, you’ve got to trust this.’ It was basically his dying wish to me, and it lit a fire under me that was so fierce. So this whole record is in honor of him, because it never would have happened if he hadn’t given me that inspiration.”
Produced by Kelly Winrich (multi-instrumentalist for California-based indie-rock band Delta Spirit), Love, Loss + Recovery finds Nauta joining forces with such esteemed musicians as Jesse Harris (a Grammy Award-winner known for his work with Norah Jones) and C.J. Camerieri (a multi-instrumentalist who’s worked with Paul Simon and Bon Iver), blending elements of soul and country and gospel to dream up a mesmerizing sound all her own. In that process, Nauta and her bandmates recorded at Winrich’s Brooklyn studio, laying down most of the album live and breathing a boundless vitality into each track. “Everything was done literally from scratch—just me and the boys bringing the songs to life together in the moment,” Nauta says.
Elegantly arranged and simply adorned, Love, Loss + Recovery draws much of its impact from Nauta’s voice: a formidable instrument that gracefully channels everything from sorrow to longing to full-hearted compassion. On the album-opening “Ready for Love,” for instance, she offers up a smoldering meditation on infidelity and forgiveness. “It’s about someone I loved at one point in my life, about living in the mistakes I made in that relationship, and the years of healing that came after that,” Nauta explains. An up-close snapshot of life’s endless complexities, Love, Loss + Recovery also includes such deeply introspective tracks as “Good Morning, My Friend”—a breathtaking slow-burner that speaks to the hard-won reclamation of self. “That came from a time in my life when making things happen with music felt so hopeless,” says Nauta. “I wrote it as a reminder to myself, saying: ‘There’s still so much more inside you, and you absolutely have something to give.’”
Elsewhere on Love, Loss + Recovery, Nauta looks back on her earliest years, delicately threading the album with the dreamy innocence of childhood. Brightly textured but exquisitely melancholy, “Wild & Free” muses on her experience in leaving home at 15 to embark on a modeling career. “I was able to see the world at such a young age, but there was a huge part of being young that I missed out on,” she says. “‘Wild & Free’ is about wanting to be little again, so that life can’t really touch you.” And on the luminous finale to Love, Loss + Recovery, Nauta conjures up a rush of warmly detailed memories of her brother Josh and their cherished time together as children. “Josh started using drugs his junior year of high school, and from then on I was chasing the little boy he used to be for the rest of my life,” she says. “‘Remember’ is about where we grew up in Oregon, with all these giant pine trees and fields of hay and a filbert orchard right behind our house. It was so hard watching him live and die in his addiction every day, so I’d always try to go back to that place in my mind.”
Originally from the Oregon town of Woodburn, Nauta first realized her love of music as a little girl in that idyllic wonderland. “We had this old cherry tree in our backyard, and I’d spend hours swinging in the swing under that tree, just singing myself to tears,” she recalls. “I was so young that I didn’t even know what I was singing about, but I’d curate this whole story about being in love and being swept off my feet—it just made my imagination come alive.” Partly attributing her vocal talents to her grandfather (a first-rate yodeler), Nauta grew up singing in church and discovered her passion for performing at her hometown’s annual May Day event. “We’d rehearse for months and the whole town would come out and watch as we put on a two-night show,” recalls Nauta, whose performances included such classics as Whitney Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You.”
Upon leaving Woodburn to pursue modeling, Nauta quickly landed in the pages of such iconic magazines as Italian Vogue and worked with leading brands like Versace, L’Oréal, and DKNY. Moving to New York City at age 18, she then balanced her modeling work with her first serious foray into music, joining a local band as well as writing her own songs and recording covers—including a rendition of Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” that caught the ear of the legendary Lenny Kravitz. “All of a sudden I’m in a studio with Lenny, sitting next to him at a piano and working on a song together,” she remembers. “He was my first-ever fan.”
Not long after that meeting, Kravitz and Nauta started working on an album together, meeting up to write and record whenever their hectic schedules allowed. Despite her dedication to the project, Nauta’s entire trajectory soon shifted when acclaimed filmmaker Luc Besson cast her in Transporter 2—a 2005 release in which she starred alongside Jason Statham and contributed two songs to the soundtrack. As her acting career took off, Nauta continued working with Kravitz but never quite managed to finish up their album. “We just never really seemed to wrap it up,” she notes. “I used to get very discouraged because my heart was always in music more than anything, and I just kept wondering, ‘Is this every really going to happen?’”
Determined to move forward with her music, Nauta connected with Kelly Winrich in 2017 and began recording some of the songs she’d gathered over the years. That determination intensified as her brother grew more ill, reaching its peak during her final FaceTime conversation with Josh in the brief spell of sobriety just before he died. “Right when I saw him I knew something was different,” Nauta says. “His eyes were brighter, he was so full of joy and life—it was like my brother was back.” Returning to Oregon to be with Josh for the last three days of his life, Nauta reconnected with Winrich several months later, and soon set to work on her debut album.
As she completed the batch of songs that would eventually comprise Love, Loss + Recovery, Nauta immersed herself in the same emotional outpouring she first experienced underneath that cherry tree back in Woodburn. “If I’m going through something hard or heavy, one of the best ways for me to process everything is to sit down at the piano,” says Nauta. “Most of these stories come from working through those feelings—just letting them all out into the song.”
Revealing Nauta’s extraordinary grace as a songwriter, Love, Loss + Recovery ultimately turns her personal pain into music with a universal resonance. “One of the most amazing things is when people come up to me after a show and tell me they feel like I was singing directly to them,” says Nauta, who’s recently opened for such artists as Mavis Staples and Anderson .Paak. “And even though these are my stories I’m sharing on this album, I want everyone to feel like I’m telling their story too. I want my songs to speak to a part of their heart that feels untouched, and let them know they’re not alone in the world.”
