Katie Cole Goes Into the Forest — And Takes Us Along for the Ride
CHECK OUT OUR ZOOM CALL WITH KATIE COLE FROM APRIL OF 2026
There are musicians who do one thing really well, and then there are musicians like Katie Cole, for whom the question “So, what exactly do you do?” is apparently an invitation to list half the job descriptions in the music business.
Singer? Absolutely. Songwriter? Obviously. Bass player? Keys? Touring musician? Arranger? Cole has done all of it, and over the past decade, she’s built the kind of résumé that makes the rest of us feel like we’ve been seriously underachieving with our free time. The Australian-born, Nashville-based artist has toured in various roles with the Smashing Pumpkins and was also part of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit world tour, among plenty of other musical adventures.
For those of us at CleveRock who have had the pleasure of interviewing Cole over the years, she’s also become one of our favorite artists to talk to. She’s smart, funny, refreshingly candid and clearly incapable of approaching music without throwing herself completely into it. That last quality is particularly evident on her upcoming album, Forest, due out September 24, 2026.
And “album” might undersell what Cole has created this time around.
Forest is a concept album divided into two distinct sides: Side A, “Out of the Woods,” and Side B, “Into the Forest.” It was crowdfunded by Cole’s fans, recorded with an orchestra and, by her own description, became her most personal work to date. What began as a desire to finally make an orchestral record evolved into something much more ambitious — and much more emotionally revealing — as Cole wrote, recorded and reworked the material while simultaneously navigating the loss of her mother.
In other words, Cole didn’t exactly choose the easy route.
When asked about all of the different performing roles she’s occupied throughout her career, Cole gave an answer that might as well serve as her unofficial professional biography:
“When people ask me, what do you do? Do you sing? Do you write songs? Do you play bass? Do you play keys? Do you play with this person? Do you play with that person? I usually just say ‘Yes! Yes to all of the above.’”
That versatility has been a defining part of Cole’s career, but Forest represents a different kind of challenge. She had always dreamed of making an orchestral record, inspired by the enormous emotional arrangements of classic recordings from the 1950s and ’60s. She just didn’t necessarily plan on making an entire concept album around the idea.
The songs had other plans.
“I’ve always wanted to make an album with an orchestra because who doesn’t want to do that? Who doesn’t want to dive into those classic 1950s and 1960s records that have these massive emotional sweeping sounds of them? I didn’t even think I was going to make a concept record. I just started writing the songs and it sort of dawned on me that this sort of only goes on way and it’s a very expensive way, but I had never done anything like that before because I’d never thought, well, I could do that. I launched a Crowdfunder while on the road with Smashing Pumpkins in 2024 and I’d written what I thought would be all of the songs. I ended up rewriting and adding another song to that. But it was such a long process and very difficult to do while I was grieving my mother had passed, but I was just doing so many things at once and the songs that I’d written went so much deeper than anything else that I thought I kind of have to give this one everything.”
It’s the sort of story that makes you wonder whether Cole has ever heard the phrase “maybe don’t make your life more difficult than it needs to be.”
Apparently not.
“I don’t know if it was pure insanity or if it was ambitious. I don’t know if there’s even a difference when you’re a songwriter. Nobody tells you you can’t do this, you don’t know what you can’t do until you realize that you can do it or can’t do it. I think the songs really dictated that this needed to be a certain way and the songs themselves.”
There’s something particularly revealing in Cole’s insistence that the songs dictated the direction of the album. Forest wasn’t conceived as an elaborate exercise in musical excess simply because an orchestra sounds cool — although, let’s be honest, an orchestra does sound pretty damn cool. The scale of the record grew because Cole felt the songs demanded it.
That meant finding a way to actually pay for it.
Cole launched the crowdfunding campaign while she was on the road with Smashing Pumpkins in 2024, essentially asking the people who had supported her music to help her make the record she envisioned. For independent artists, crowdfunding can be both a lifeline and an enormous amount of work. It’s not simply a matter of asking fans for money and then disappearing into the studio. There are rewards to create, deadlines to meet and, perhaps most painfully for some artists, the need to constantly remind people that the project exists.
Cole is refreshingly honest about that part of the equation.
“I literally wouldn’t be able to make music on this scale without fans. I’m just being honest. I would still aim to make the same music. It would just take a lot longer. I took ages making this record as it was. Crowdfunding is a lot of work to do in the sense that you have to make the record within a reasonable timeframe and create a lot of very special rewards that are just for them that aren’t going to be just for everybody else as well. Some artists are really good at self-promotion and I just want people to hear the music and I don’t care how you consume music, but I also know that life is also transactional. If I don’t sell something, then my cats don’t eat.”
It’s difficult to argue with the logic. Art may be priceless, but cats remain stubbornly committed to eating.
More importantly, the crowdfunding campaign gave Cole the opportunity to create Forest without compromising the scope she felt the material required. And the album’s two sides provide the framework for a concept that ultimately became much bigger than simply putting a collection of songs together.
“Out of the Woods” represents emergence — the idea of coming through something difficult and finding yourself back in the world. “Into the Forest” recognizes the slightly less comfortable truth that life doesn’t really work that way. You don’t necessarily emerge from one challenge and suddenly arrive at some magical destination where everything is figured out.
Sometimes you just walk into another forest.
“We came out of the pandemic and I’d written a more acoustic EP called ‘Rivers and Roads.’ And we’re all let loose back into the world and I was like, we’re all supposed to go back to normal and do normal things. And I was like, I don’t know if that’s happening. So that was my underlying subconscious notion of what was happening in the world. I thought, ‘Well, what if I can reel this into what I’m doing with this album?’ And I thought, ‘Well, if you’re coming out of the woods, that’s an idea. And then if you’re going into the forest because you never really come out of something, you just change directions and sometimes you end up going into something even deeper. Sometimes it’s something better, sometimes it’s something more exciting, but that’s how life works. It’s never smooth sailing. It’s usually like, ‘Is there a boat?’”
That final question may be one of the most succinct descriptions of adulthood ever offered by a songwriter.
The pandemic provided the initial backdrop for the concept, but the loss of Cole’s mother gave the record an entirely different emotional dimension. Grief has a way of rearranging your understanding of time, mortality and what actually matters. For Cole, it also reinforced the importance of making the most of the life she has.
“I think any sort of big emotional shift is going to affect you in every way. You don’t really know what that will be until you experience it. I don’t think anybody experiences grief or heartbreak for that matter in the same way. For me, it just made me feel off balance for a while when you lose a parent and it’s a real understanding of, oh, life really doesn’t last forever, nothing lasts forever. You sort of have a very quick mortal view of everything that is temporary and everything in life is temporary. And I’m not being negative, I’m just being honest about this. I don’t think I’ve ever skirted the edges as a writer anyway, but it made me go make it really count. That touch with mortality and my understanding of things, it just makes me go, ‘Just do better. Do better at your own life and do better, be kinder.’ That’s what my mom would’ve wanted. It makes sense that that’s how I feel.”
That may be the heart of Forest. For all of the orchestration, ambition and elaborate conceptual framework, this is ultimately a record about being human — about grief, change, uncertainty, recovery and the realization that none of us gets to stay in one place forever.
And perhaps that’s why one particular compliment from a friend meant so much to Cole.
After sending her friend the finished album, Cole received a message that essentially described the highest possible compliment for someone who grew up loving records: that Forest might be the kind of album someone could discover decades later and have it fundamentally alter their life.
“One of my girlfriends reached out to me after I sent her the record and she said, ‘I really think this is one of those albums that if you are a teenage person and found this record in an attic somewhere, it would change your life.’ And I was like, ‘That’s the biggest compliment I think I’ve ever had,’ because I think as music lovers, we’ve all had those albums that we’ve just discovered like a stumble across or someone’s like, you got to listen to this record and it just changes you.”
That’s a particularly fitting way to think about Forest. The best albums aren’t always the ones we discover when we’re looking for them. Sometimes they’re the records that find us at exactly the right moment — sitting in an attic, scrolling through someone’s recommendation, digging through a record collection or simply pressing play because something about the cover caught our attention.
Whether Forest ultimately becomes that album for someone remains to be seen. But the fact that Cole was willing to chase that possibility — while grieving her mother, touring with one of rock’s most recognizable bands, crowdfunding an expensive orchestral production and essentially allowing the songs to determine just how far she needed to go — says plenty about the artist who made it.
Katie Cole has spent the past decade proving that she can sing, write, play, tour and seemingly do whatever else a song requires. With Forest, she’s added another item to that list: making one hell of an ambitious record.
And if the journey really does require going into the forest, we’re glad she’s invited us along.
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