When Karen Bella sat down to record “Living on the Great” during the early days of the pandemic, she didn’t set out to create anything grandiose. Her friend and producer, Teddy Kumpel, who has worked with big names like Nine Inch Nails, and Joe Jackson, had casually suggested she send over anything she was working on—just two friends sharing music in lockdown. What emerged was something she’d never done before: a layered, Enya-esque meditation on childhood, memory, and the vertigo of adulthood that she built in real-time, adding vocal layers as she molded the sonic lattice.
“It’s about looking back at my childhood asking, hey, do you remember when you were younger and you looked at your life differently?” Bella explains from her Brooklyn apartment, as traffic honks, and the city is fully alive outside of her window. “When I was younger, I wanted to be older, but now that I’m older, I want to be younger. Life was so much more easy and simple back then. Now it’s really complicated.”
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That song wouldn’t see release until November 2025. It was part of a five-year creative drought that began the moment her self-titled EP dropped in 2020, literally the day before COVID shut everything down. “I was left with all this merchandise and all these CDs. So the worry was, what do I do with this record that I spent twenty grand on?” she recalls. She spent years sitting on a catalog of ten recorded songs, searching for the right mixer, navigating the chaos of the pandemic, waiting for the moment when she could finally share the work she’d poured herself into.
Bella isn’t new to the music industry. She started booking recording sessions at age 9 and was writing her own songs by 12. Since then, she’s built a career that includes endorsements from Fishman, Yamaha, and Elixir Strings, performances at NAMM twice, and chart success— hitting #30 on Folk Alliance International while her single “Indio” reached #2 on the World Indie Music Charts with over 32,000 streams. Her single, “Rise Up” gained her over 68.7k streams on Spotify. She’s played landmark venues across the tri-state area and opened for artists like Hannah Wicklund.
Now, in the span of a few months, Bella has unleashed three singles that showcase her range as a songwriter—from psychedelic folk to raw grief to Renaissance romance. And she’s just getting started.
When Grief Sends a Fax
If “Living on the Great” is about reconciling the complexities of time, “Guitar in the Air” (released in January) is about reconciling grief and the intricacies of loss. Written four years after her father’s passing, the song didn’t come naturally at first.
“When you lose somebody, everyone handles death differently and grieves differently,” Bella says. “You would think, okay, my father passed, I should write a song. But I didn’t feel like—what am I gonna write about? That I’m sad? You know?”
Then one day, what she describes as a “fax machine” of melody arrived in her head. She didn’t want to write it, because the song felt too raw, too painful. But, still, it persisted with a simple question: If he showed up in front of me right now, like apparated out of nowhere, what would I do?
“It’s questioning, is there even an existence after you pass? Because I don’t know, but I feel it. And so I choose to believe,” she explains.
The title comes from the song’s central question: Can you hear my guitar in the air, wherever it is that you are? It’s a song built on hope and uncertainty in equal measure—sonically sparse compared to the vocal clouds of “Living on the Great,” primarily lead vocals and instrumental, asking if love persists beyond the veil.
Dead Wood, Lust, and Shakespeare’s Finest
Then there’s “Sonnet 128,” dropping February 13th, the day before Valentine’s Day, timing that is both strategic and cosmically apropos for a song about desire.
For those who haven’t revisited Shakespeare’s sonnets since high school, Sonnet 128 is about a man watching a woman play the virginals (a keyboard instrument), consumed with jealousy of the instrument itself—specifically the wood beneath her fingers. He longs to be that dead wood, to feel her touch, before finally abandoning metaphor entirely: Give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.
“I thought it was really beautiful,” Bella says. “And Valentine’s Day, what a better time to release the song of lust and love than before the day of romance.”
The track has its origins in 2017, when Bella was cast in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at Merrick Theater, while recovering from a year of vocal loss. “I lost my voice for about a year, so I had to go to speech therapy and learn how to sing again,” she says. “It was incorrect technique and acid reflux. But it’s also a soul thing. If something’s not right in your heart and your mind, it plays out physically.”
She was trying to avoid music entirely, and focus primarily on acting, but the universe had other plans. The director, Mark DeCaterina, knew she was a songwriter. He asked her to set Sonnet 128 to music, and she did. Years later, working with Kumpel, she synthesized something that’s “partially modern, partially Renaissance, with flute and harpsichord.”
She’s adapted the text with slight variations, weaving in unique vocal arrangements that connect back to the layered aesthetic of “Living on the Great.” It’s utterly unlike her 2020 work and the driving energy of her 2023 single “Rise Up,” a deliberate expansion of her sonic palette.
Music as Miraculous Coping Mechanism
As the world continues to feel overwhelming on every possible level, Bella views songwriting as a medium beyond artistic expression — it’s survival, it’s healing, it’s a portal into new possibilities.
“Life is difficult,” she says plainly. “Getting up, paying your bills, making money. Beautiful things can happen in your life privately—now add all the gobbledygook that’s going on and then you have the pressures of social media. Then you have the news and it’s very overwhelming to our minds, bodies and souls. What’s a way to get away from all of this stuff? Some people meditate, some people eat, some people do drugs, some people create music and some people listen to music.”
She positions music-making as a channeling practice, something larger than herself moving through her spirit. “You are tapping into something that is higher than yourself. You’re healing yourself and you’re hoping it heals someone else,” she explains.
That philosophy extends to how she views love and passion, and even the romantic relationships that end in heartbreak.
“These intense, passionate connections that you dream of and that you see in the movies: when you finally have that, it is the most incredible feeling. Even if your heart’s gonna be broken and you’re gonna be shattered and you’re not gonna shower for a month—these experiences are what it’s all about.”
This perspective infuses “Sonnet 128” with layers beyond desire, and yearning. “You can view ‘Sonnet 128’ as something that is mainly desire and lust, or you can view it as love because love is all of those things mixed up together. Romance is all of these things mixed up together.”
The Gumbo Approach to Genre
For listeners new to Bella’s work, expect the unexpected. She describes her catalog as “a bit of a gumbo. You’ll have someone who’s more into blues and they’re seeing me perform ‘Guitar in the Air’ and ‘Living on the Great’ and ‘Sonnet 128’ and they’re like, okay, those are nice songs,” she laughs. “But then I’ll do a song (that’s in the process of being mixed) called ‘If I Didn’t Go Home with You’ that’s more bar, bluesy, fun and sexy. They’ll be like, YEAH, I like that!”
Live, these new songs translate as stripped-down, intimate performances, what she calls “very singer-songwriter, low key things. This is for people who are very deep, empathetic, introspective who think and feel a lot.” Think Harry Chapin or John Mayer with just guitar and voice, where it’s all about the energy pushed through the instrument.
But she’s not limiting herself to one mode. There are more production-heavy songs coming, more rock, more blues. “As a singer songwriter, you don’t want to have 20 different genres within one thing. But you can have different parts of yourself. You can have the happy, the sad, and the rock and roll side of you.”
What’s Next: Constellation Building
After this run of singles, Bella is weighing her options: another EP, more singles, or a full-length album. She’s leaning toward the latter, because, as she puts it, “there’s something really old school about releasing a full album.”
She’s currently finalizing a collection of songs, produced by Josh Dion, some are piano-led and sonically distinct from this recent trio. “I just gotta thread all the songs together. What’s the common thing about them?,” she wondered.
Well, it’s constellation-building, finding the through-line that connects these disparate emotional landscapes into a cohesive galaxy of sound.
For now, she’s focused on the live circuit, performing throughout the tri-state area while plotting a proper tour. Meanwhile, her songs are finding their audiences organically through Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, each track a new point of light in her expanding universe.
“I feel if you like music, if you respect music, you’re going to like everything. You’re going to respect everything,” she says. “But I think that there’s a little bit for everyone on these songs.”
“Sonnet 128” releases February 13, 2026. Find Karen Bella on all streaming platforms and at karenbella.com
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