About Kate Voegele

Hey all,

First of all, thank you for being here. On my website, or wherever else you’re finding yourself reading this. It means the world to me that you’re giving a listen to my music and what I have to say. I decided with some of the changes in my life and career over the last year that I’d rather just tell you about me instead of posting a super fancy-crafted bio full of stats and superlatives. I’m so thrilled to be releasing my third record, “Gravity Happens,” and I hope that these few paragraphs give you a better idea of what I’m about, where these songs came from and what they mean.

People want to know “who” Kate Voegele is. Because as I’ve learned in my years in this peculiar industry, saying ‘I’m a singer-songwriter and here are my songs’ is simply not enough. The folks who are in my ear asking who I am are not talking about songs. They are talking about an angle. I don’t really have one of those, because it seems that so often in the entertainment business, those can be fabricated things that people employ because they are afraid that who they are and what they stand for isn’t interesting enough. I may not have a made up angle, but I have a story and I have a voice. And I like to think it’s interesting enough. So here it is.

Who is Kate Voegele? Kate Voegele is me, and I’m a 24 year old girl who picked up a guitar when I was 15 years old and haven’t put it down since. I have an insatiable curiosity and that curiosity is what prompted me to start writing songs. Why do I keep writing them? Because I need to. To make sense of the world and my daily interactions and experiences.

I want my music to be your favorite pair of blue jeans. I want it to be comfy. Perhaps that’s an artsy way of saying I want my record to be the one that you put on regardless of where you are and how you’re feeling because you know you’re going to take something away from it no matter what’s going on in your life. What kind of music is it? That’s usually the number one question on everyone’s list for a singer/songwriter. My music is the chicken soup kind. Or at least that’s what I hope it is. I want people to get a good feeling in their soul from these songs. Roots rock, heartland rock…whatever you want to call it is okay with me. I just want it to make people feel good inside. Some artists like to illustrate their sound by naming a couple of wildly successful musicians who are already out there and then deem themselves the love child of said performers. I don’t really know who I’m the love child of. I know that women like Sheryl Crow, Shania Twain and Joni Mitchell made me want to sing. And I know that sharing the stage with Neil Young at Farm Aid in high school nearly made me faint. And that opening for Patty Griffin and Grace Potter changed the way I thought about what it means to play live music. But I’m not really trying to be the next anyone. I’m just being the first me.

I’m a girl who grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. And after my dad taught me how to play a guitar, I started playing shows around my hometown and the Midwest. My senior year, I played SXSW in Austin alongside my favorite artists and idols at Farm Aid.   And then one day, in my college dorm room, I got a message from first friend Tom on MySpace who was starting a record label and had found me on his website among millions of people and wanted to sign me as his first artist. I left college in Ohio to make a record, started touring with acts like Natasha Bedingfield and playing my music acting on multiple seasons of the CW show "One Tree Hill." On the show, I performed my songs as a character named Mia each week whose storyline was essentially dictated by the music. I released a second record and partnered with sponsors like University of Phoenix, Ford, and Oakley. This summer, I’m releasing a signature series of sunglasses that I designed with Oakley. It’s one of the most exciting things I’ve ever done. When I wasn't scribbling songs on napkins in high school, I was the kid in the art room all day long. I was a Fine Arts major in college, and I've always dreamed of having the opportunity to design. Finally, my mess of acrylic paint and canvas in the back lounge of my tour bus is finding a home.

I’m still quite “Ohio” at heart. Most days, a pair of 30-dollar vintage red boots take me around town. I am very much a ripped jeans and white t-shirt girl, but on the days that the fine arts major in me does the dressing, it’s anybody’s guess. You will much sooner find me working on my (less than impressive…for now) darts game, hanging at a dive bar with my band than at a Hollywood club in a sparkly outfit. Though I have nothing whatsoever against sparkly outfits. I pretty much like everyone, and I will talk to anyone. My stage presence is as much a casual informality as this bio. I like to hang out with the audience. Carole King’s Living Room tour was one of my first concerts, and I decided I was going to be a musician who played shows that gave people a chance to just ‘sit in my living room’ with me.

But the main point of a bio is to give the reader a better understanding of the artist’s vision and voice with regards to their current material. So I will say that this record is inspired by and for the people who have taught me how to be brave when gravity happens. Those people are everywhere in my life. This bio would be a novel if I were to cite every source of that inspiration. But this year my life was met with changes that I would not have known how to handle were it not for some standout experiences. I spent a week in a trash dump community in Managua, Nicaragua and met a little girl named Hojayi who, at 9 years old, knows more about what it means to love and to believe than I probably ever will. I watched my aunt battle cancer and meet the menace of a merciless disease with the vitality and fearlessness of a warrior. I was blessed with the friendship of a man whose courage and passion for life in the face of an accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down and with a wife who subsequently left him is unlike any I’ve ever seen. This record is about what happens when you get to a point in your life when you realize that the world can be more cruel and scary than you ever imagined. Whether we’re watching an earthquake devastating an entire country on television or going through our own daily challenges which are petty in comparison, we feel the weight of life more than ever as we grow up. I just hope that these songs can take a tiny bit of that weight off…for anyone or everyone who hears them. So maybe I do have an angle after all. And that’s always what it’s going to be.

Simply put, my fans and the people who are touched by this music mean everything to me. My biggest thanks goes out to them for inspiring me every day I wake up to “fasten wings to my shoes.” 

x0x0 kv

For Management, please contact: Management@katevoegele.com 

For Booking, please contact: ValWolfe@theagencygroup.com