Mark Stefanos
Tonight, Katelyn Tarver will take the arena stage in São Paulo, opening for Big Time Rush as part of their In Real Life Worldwide Tour, thousands of miles away from her Los Angeles home. For Tarver, who in person is charming and self-deprecating, quick to laugh and quicker with a joke, the moment must feel like a topsy-turvy déjà vu: more than a decade ago she appeared on the Nickelodeon comedy “Big Time Rush” as the on-screen love interest of one of the band members. Now she’s back alongside the group in front of crowds who remember her from those tween days — and have followed her as she’s grown into a pop star in her own right.
Her performance tonight coincides with the album she released today, Tell Me How You Really Feel, which captures one of the most turbulent periods of her life with raw storytelling and her crystalline croon. Written in the year following her divorce, the record preserves the immediacy and emotional upheaval of those days without the smoothing filter of time. Listening through it, the songs move through grief, relief, confusion and freedom, sometimes within the same track. Tarver wrote most of the album while the events themselves were still unfolding, which is exactly how she wanted it.
Katelyn Tarver (Catherine Herber)
“I was writing it in the moment,” she told LA Weekly when she joined us from her hotel room in Lima, Peru, last week. “I was just so aware that I was never going to be in that place in my life again, and I just wanted to try and record it.”
That place, as she describes it, was emotionally chaotic. Tarver had spent nearly a decade married to the man she met when she was 20 years old. Over the course of their relationship, she was also navigating changes in her creed and sense of self. “I got married really young and I was pretty religious,” she says. “Over the last 10 years, I was going through having faith and then questioning it, and then ultimately losing that version of my belief system.”
Her relationship with her now-ex continued even as those internal movements kept creeping up. “I was just changing so much and trying to sort through all these identity shifts,” Tarver says. “It got to this point where I felt like I wanted to leave the relationship, but it was just so unthinkable. I was like, well, I can’t do that, that’s crazy!”
She imagined every possible consequence of leaving and tried to prepare herself for the fallout. “I’d done so much thinking about what might happen if I leave, trying to prepare myself for every outcome that could be painful,” she says.
When she finally made the decision, the emotional reality proved as complicated as she had expected. “I had to take the leap and do what felt right for me, and disappoint people, and hurt people, and kind of choose myself,” she says. “Which I felt was so selfish and mean.”
That tension runs throughout Tell Me How You Really Feel. Tarver wasn’t interested in writing a breakup album that tied everything neatly together. Instead, she tried to capture the moment as honestly as possible, which she describes as “all these conflicting emotions hitting me at one time and trying to just be present for all of them.”
What surprised her most was how disorienting the aftermath felt. “Even though it felt like it was the right decision, I would still have days where I was really sad, and then days where I felt free and liberated and doing everything I wanted to do. Just trying to express all the in-betweens was my goal.”
Eventually she found a way to channel that whole spectrum of self-discovery into her creative process.
Katelyn Tarver (Catherine Herber)
“I was wondering if I would ever be an artist again,” says Tarver. “I didn’t know if I would put out any music. I felt like I was at such a blank slate of my life — like, well, gosh, I can do anything. I just left everything behind that I’ve ever known. Who do I really want to be moving forward? What do I really like?
“I had ideas, but when you’re so used to being someone’s partner, and in this relationship, and that’s your friends, that’s your life, that’s all you’ve known — every restaurant in the city is a place you’ve been to together. I really felt like I was starting from scratch.”
Los Angeles itself is part of that emotional landscape. The album includes references to familiar spots — “I’m just a basic Eastside bitch,” she says — including Covell wine bar, where Tarver once had an unexpected run-in with her ex after the divorce. The encounter turned into a long conversation that eventually helped redefine their relationship.
Today, they remain close. “We’re actually really great friends,” Tarver says. “And I am so thankful for it. If I knew we were going to get to be friends at the end of this, I would have been shocked. I was so scared of losing him in general.
“We share so much history with each other. It just felt like it worked for us to start this new journey as friends.”
Tarver’s marriage grew through their church in LA, where faith played a major role in her daily life and social circle. The dissolution of their union also came with a reconsideration of that faith, which she says she now approaches with a broader spiritual perspective.
Katelyn Tarver (Catherine Herber)
“I spent so many years trying to get to the bottom of everything. I think I’m just a little more open to it being more of a mystery,” she says. “I’m a creative person. I feel like I tap into something spiritual when I’m performing and when I’m writing.”
The decision to split from her ex and the ensuing process of writing the album were inspired by an unexpected source: stand-up comedy. A chunk of Tarver’s LA crew is made up of comedians, partly through her brother, actor and comedian Drew Tarver (star of “The Other Two,” and “Running Point”). She became fascinated by the way comics mine their personal lives for material.
“I started to think about the correlation between stand-up comedy and songwriting,” Tarver says, a realization that came from watching Ali Wong’s stand-up specials, where the comedian discusses her marriage and eventual divorce with cutting and hilarious candor.
“I was also married at the time and I was listening to some of the stuff she was saying, and I was like, ‘Hmm, okay,’ because you’re connecting with stuff and you’re like, ‘Oh, no, what does this mean?’ And then when she got divorced, I was like, ‘Wait — wait! Okay, yeah, me too!’” she laughs. “And then she talks about being friends with her ex. I just resonated with so much of it.”
For Tarver, the appeal comes from the radical honesty of the form. “Stand-up is the ultimate form of vulnerability and telling the truth so people can connect with it and feel less alone,” she says. “That’s what I try to bring to my songwriting.”
Tarver’s path to this moment stretches back much further than this album cycle. She grew up in the South and entered the entertainment industry as a teenager, making the top 10 of “American Juniors,” a spin-off of “American Idol,” before moving to LA to pursue acting and music.
That younger version had a simple dream. “I was a 14, 15-year-old girl from small-town Georgia that wanted to be a pop star,” she says. “I wanted to be Jessica Simpson.”
She long viewed those years as awkward relics of a career she didn’t fully control at the time. “I think for a while I was embarrassed by the things I had done as a teenager,” she says. Her perspective has since softened. “It’s been nice to get older and take more ownership of my career. I look back with more love for myself and grace for the younger version of me that just didn’t know any better.”
Now, two decades later, Tarver finds herself releasing the most personal music of her career while touring internationally. She’ll soon headline a mini-tour in venues across the U.S., where she’ll share songs from Tell Me How You Really Feel all on her own.
She’s also continuing acting with a role in the upcoming golf-centered comedy series starring Will Ferrell. Tarver describes the experience of working alongside Ferrell and Molly Shannon as surreal. “Just a crazy, wacky set … I feel like I learned so much from Molly,” she says. “And I get the occasional scene with Will and I was just in heaven. I was soaking it all in, just so happy to be there. I was nervous.”
An added bonus is that the show will be on Netflix, just a scroll away from her brother’s show “Running Point.” — “Tarver siblings on Netflix, taking over,” she says.
It’s here in the convo that Tarver reveals why she’s really doing this interview: “Let’s get it out there that I’m funnier than Drew, okay? That’s the goal with the entire press circuit. We need to take him down a notch. He’s a little too comfortable up there. I made him, essentially, and he has forgotten that.”
With that sibling rivalry out of the way, the focus returns to the album and the period of life it captures. Tarver has had some distance from the emotional storm that inspired the songs, enough to look back and recognize how much has changed in a short amount of time. “I am really happy now,” she says.
One lyric from the the track “So Am I” has come to feel like a summary of the journey that brought her here:
“Life’s hard,” Tarver sings, “but at least it’s mine.”
For more information about Katelyn Tarver’s tour, including a show at the Echoplex on May 24, visit katelyntarver.com.
Katelyn Tarver on the March 6, 2026, issue of LA Weekly (Photo: Catherine Herber; cover design: Mark Stefanos)