It’s been four years since Kalie Shorr, one of the very best of the post-Avril generation of alt-pop singers, has put out a new collection of material. But you can’t keep her away from releasing aggressive, attitude-filled songs about boys (and, since she came out as bisexual, girls) any more than she can keep herself from pursuing her type. Which happens to be the subject of her new EP — called, yes, “My Type” — and a title track that has Shorr exploring what draws her to both the Kurts and the Courtneys in her life. The six-track set is out on DSPs Friday.
A Maine native who moved to Nashville and then L.A., Shorr started out in the country space and was a regular guest on the Grand Ole Opry, a CMT Next Women of Country artist and a Bobby Bones-mentored podcaster. Her material was gravitating toward an edgier brand of pop-rock by the time she released her acclaimed debut album, “Open Book,” which was named by the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica as one of 2019’s 10 best albums. She was headed more firmly in the punky-pop direction of her biggest influences by the time Butch Walker produced her 2021 EP “I Got Here by Accident.” But, unless you followed her captivating social media accounts, she seemed to have disappeared after that. In a video series she posted titled “How I Got Unfamous,” she told how she followed some bad advice — like ahow she should just stop writing and wait for her record contract to expire — while suffering other career mishaps. Like everything she does, that series was an open book.
Now she’s back to being an open record, with a rocking EP about her “situationships” that precedes what she says will be a broader-based album down the road. Variety got on a Zoom with Shorr to talk about the new record, coming out as queer, connecting recently with Paris Hilton, whether her viral videos got too popular for her music’s own good, and why she reveres Taylor Swift yet really all roads lead back to Michelle Branch (especially if you’re on edibles).
What’s the musical aesthetic that most appeals to you right now? You started out in country, but it’s been at least a few years now where your affinity for Alanis Morissette, Liz Phair, Avril Lavigne and other people along those lines —Girl Rock, as you’ve described it — was at the forefront. Was that a difficult transition to navigate?
I think that Butch Walker made that very easy, working with him on my last project [“I Got Here by Accident,” her 2021 EP]. Unfortunately, he’s on an international tour right now, so we couldn’t work on this project together, but we still talk all the time, and I was sending him songs as I was learning how to produce over the course of this EP. And he introduced me to Stacy Glen Jones, who worked on my new single, “When in Rome.” So it was not as hard as some people might think. I feel like the foundation of my songs is always the same, and it has been for years at this point, where it’s electric guitars, drums, rock-sounding stuff. And my influences have never changed, so that’s also helpful.
Obviously not every Taylor Swift fan is a KaIie Shorr fan, but I think every Kalie Shorr fan is a Taylor Swift fan — like, across the board. And Swifties literally don’t care what style of music she makes; they’re there for her lyrics and her delivery and her outlook. So that is something I’m really thankful to her for, stylistically, for making genre agnosticism possible. Olivia Rodrigo is also a great example of somebody taking that and running with it, and even Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan… it doesn’t matter anymore. Genre is important for classifying things on DSPs, but other than that it’s not really that important. So no one has been like, “Oh, she’s too pop” — it’s not surprising anybody.
It has been four years since that Butch Walker EP. And you’ve talked about some difficulties in your business world that made the delay longer than it might have been. But have you been hoarding material during that time?
Well, it has been a year since I posted the “How I Got Unfamous” series, which was me talking about why I disappeared. Because I didn’t want to. It just kind of happened, and I got dropped by my manager of nine years the same day I lost my record deal. I took some bad advice, which was on me, and everything kind of fell apart. I was living in L.A. and I had to really reassess everything. During that period I was still writing for other artists, so I never stopped doing music. I got a gold record with this artist named Upsahl, for a song called “People I Don’t Like.” But everybody knows you can’t make money just being a songwriter, so that wasn’t helpful in that department. But for my own artist project, I just felt like I was in the middle of the ocean without an oar, and I was just like, “Oh, oh no —there’s nobody around.” It was my first time not having a team. And no matter how much you do as an artist, I was operating at a high enough level in the industry that not having a team was impossible, because all of my connections had been through them, and there was just stuff I literally didn’t know how to do.
And at some point you decided to talk about it on social media, directly to fans, or even people coming to you for the first time, through these “How I Got Unfamous” videos where you talked about how you got stuck. Which was a bold thing to do, but not surprising, given your historical candor.
I just got to this point where I was like, you know what? Every single time in my career that I’ve been lost and not known what the next move was, the answer has just been to tell the truth. Even if it’s uncomfortable — I mean, I’ve done that in my music a million times. I did that with dealing with my sister’s passing [her sister died in 2019 amid an addiciton battle], just being radically honest. I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll just go online and complain about how I’m not famous anymore and see what happens. People are probably gonna think I’m a douchebag, but I do feel like at least someone will be interested in this.” And at the very least, I feel like a good piece of social media advice is to answer questions that people have but aren’t gonna ask you. And one question people had was: Where the fuck did you go?
So I made “How I Got Unfamous, Part 1,” and the reaction was nuts. I’d had a few viral videos that were just completely about me joking around and my personality, but that was totally different. Then I had this huge groundswell of fans who were getting answers and were like, “Oh my God, you’re still here.” The algorithm was in my favor, so it was getting pushed to people who’d followed me, and then I had a lot of people in the industry who had had the same question, so I was reconnecting with people from my past who were able to help. My new manager, J.R. Schulman, was the person who put me on SiriusXM, on “The Highway,” with my first single, “Fight Like a Girl” (in 2017). So we started working together, and I started working with my other manager, Margaret Valentine, and that was really what made this the right time, now, was having a team again.
And I’ve had these songs —I have been hoarding them. This is the first time I’ve released a project where the songs spanned such a long time period. The first song, “My Type,” was written in 2017, and then “When in Rome” was written in May of this past year. But I felt like with having a new team and having new ears on everything, it was the time to revisit songs I loved in the past that didn’t necessarily get a chance. And yeah, it was a long, long, long journey to get here. But I’m really excited to feel like I’m back on my bullshit.
What was the upshot of posting those “How I Got Unfamous” videos? You’ve been brilliant at having a somewhat comical social media presence. Did this feel next-level in terms of taking it more seriously?
It was interesting because I doubled my Instagram followers. I’d been at 45,000 forever — if you lose a ton, you’re also gaining, so it’s a net positive — but when I started posting videos just talking about dating and giving advice or telling funny stories, I got about 50,000 more followers, between that and “Unfamous.” So I had a lot of followers who didn’t even necessarily know that I did music, seriously. They were like, “Oh, she sings sometimes.” And I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s my whole thing! This is a little side mission while I’m bored and still have creative energy and can’t release music.” So it was like half of my audience followed me from loving my music, and then half of my audience just thought I was kind of unhinged and funny. So it’s been interesting to kind of redirect the algorithm.
I kind of had to take a hard pivot and stop posting the content that was going viral. I was at 20 million views a month on Instagram or something, and now I’m down to a million, which is not bad, but it doesn’t feel great to have that big of a dip. But the algorithm just has no idea what to do with me right now. So it’s definitely an adjustment period while I’m getting back to just doing music, which is what I want to be doing. The thing is, I’m the same person in my viral videos that I am in my songs. So I think ultimately it’s gonna be completely fine, but it feels like there’s two different versions of me that the internet is aware of, and I’m trying to figure out how to marry those two.
Kalie Shorr
Grace Greenan
You’ve been using your social media lately to talk about nostalgia for the early 2010s, whether it’s the particular aesthetics of having a Tumblr account or actually using your old iPhone 4 to shoot content because that phone’s camera has a particular look. But when it comes to what you call the “Girl Rock” that most influenced you, it seems like a lot of that predated the 2010s. Like, Alanis goes back to the ‘90s, though you were a toddler then. What do you think kind of the golden era of women in rock is?
I think that Alanis inspired so much that it felt wrong to not include her when I was doing that video. Avril Lavigne has said that she wouldn’t have existed the way that she did without Alanis, and I wouldn’t have without either of them, honestly. With just triggering nostalgia in general, I think that the golden era really was the mid-2000s for that, but that was the music I was listening to in 2011, everything from “Jagged Little Pill” to “Best Damn Thing.” I do think people are nostalgic for the 2010s right now, because there’s a recession again, and people want to feel nostalgic because we’re escaping from the horrors of 2025. But that’s kind of where they’re related for me is on a personal level, maybe not necessarily a logistical level.
But I’m excited to tell this one particular story in regards to my love for Michelle Branch. She is the golden era for me, because I’ve loved everything from her first album, “The Spirit Room” (from 2001), to “Hotel Paper,” which was more rock-influenced, and then you had her (solo) country project and then her country band, the Wreckers. And I’ve loved every iteration of her, and I think that she’s just very underrated, but people are getting back to remembering that she, like, invented this shit.
I had this moment with my single “When in Rome” when I was working on it, because I’m not in country anymore, but when I sit down to write a song by myself with just me and a guitar, that is almost always still gonna sound like a country song. Me and Stacy Glen Jones had so many versions of “When in Rome” that kept sounding country, but I loved the guitar part. And there a song that I had fallen in love with by Michelle Branch called “Through the Radio,” which is unreleased, but it’s on YouTube and you can hear it there. That was a song that I would say definitely inspired “When in Rome,” and I couldn’t stop thinking about that song, because the guitar parts have that same kind of vibe.
And I’m at a bar in Nashville, and I had taken an edible and was really high, and we’d been going back and forth all day trying to figure out this production stuff. I turn around and I see Michelle Branch at this bar. I thought I was hallucinating: “Is there something in this edible? Because there’s no way that this is just Michelle Branch standing in a bar next to me.” I went up to her and I was like, “Hi. Huge fan. You were my first concert, with the Chicks. … ‘Through the Radio’ means so much to me. I want you to release it so bad.” And she knew who I was for starters, which was mind-blowing. She was like, “Oh, you’re Kalie, right?” And she said, “That’s so funny that you bring that up, because I actually just rerecorded ‘Through the Radio’ for the first time in 15 years and I’m putting it out. Wait, what’s your number? I’ll text you the Dropbox.” And I’m high, and I don’t even know how to process this right now. And then I was like, “What did you do differently? Are you going back to the country sound?” She’s like, “No. A huge part of that was, I had to like completely reevaluate how I approached the song, and I was obsessed with the guitar part, but I had to get out of my own way and take that off the table and think about what was best for the song, instead of this thing that had been stuck in my head for 15 years.” And the song she sent to me was completely reimagined, with synthesizers…
So I’m at home, listening, staring up at the ceiling, listening to this unreleased Michelle Branch song that I’ve loved for 15 years, and I was like: “Oh my God. That’s the answer is, I have to get out of my own way with this guitar part because I want it to be in the song, but it’s making it sound country and it’s holding the song back.” I call Stacy the next day freaking out. I’m like, “I just talked to a patron saint of Girl Rock and she gave me the answer, descended from the heavens.” Who gets to say that, at a crossroads of their creativity, where they’re struggling between country and pop and rock, they get to go ask a girl who’s done all three and influenced every era of my career, and she just like gave me the answer, and I have her cell phone number. I can’t even believe that’s a real story that I’m telling right now. It sounds fake.
Let’s talk about the song “My Type.” You’ve said you wrote that back in 2017, and people didn’t want that from you at that time. You weren’t out as bisexual or queer then, but you felt the urge to put it in a song, where you have separate verses describing a man and woman you’re hungering for — identified as Kurt and Courtney types. What happened when you wanted to record that eight years ago?
I think the first time I came out to anybody was when I was 14, so I’ve known this for a very, very long time. I was out pretty much to everyone in my close friend group in Nashville about 2018-20. I didn’t come out to my parents till I was 25, because I’d been in a relationship with a man and it felt kind of pointless to be like, “Hey, mom and dad. Guess what?” Especially because they’re not incredibly supportive, at all. So I was waiting till I was seeing a woman, and that felt an important enough time to tell them. So I told ’em when I was 25. And I came out publicly in 2022, because I had, for the first time in nine years, not been with a manager who was highly suggesting that I stay closeted. Around when “Open Book” was being released (in 2019), I was like, “Hey guys, what if I came out? I wouldn’t have to hide anymore on dates…” I wanted to talk about it and sing about it, in a song like “My Type,” and not have to change the pronouns. And my publicist was like, “That’s a great idea. Why not?” And my manager was like, “Absolutely not.”
So I felt incredibly pressured, and no one can make you do anything, but it would’ve been a very, very big point of contention if I had done that against his recommendation. So I stayed closeted. And then after he dropped me in December of 2022, I came out in April of 2023. But I was not fooling anybody. There used to be this Twitter account that was like, “Is Kalie Shorr bi?,” and they would collect evidence and post it. It was not cool to out people, but being such an advocate and proponent of being honest in your songs and not hiding any part of yourself and being transparent and then staying closeted was such a hypocritical move on my part.
What it really came down to was a teenage relative of mine came out to me. She had a girlfriend; she was like 14. And I was like, “Oh my God, that’s so amazing. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You should be so proud and excited. You know that I’m so happy for you.” And then she just looked at me with that Gen Z stare, knowing I was closeted, and I was like, “OK. All right. Fine.” It made me really reassess, because I was like, “OK, if I want to be an example to her and to my queer fans, and just to my younger self who would’ve loved to see more of that, I should get over it and just tell people.” And it’s only been amazing since.
I mean, it’s definitely helpful and privileged to live in L.A. instead of Nashville, because it’s way safer here for queer people. But it’s very exciting for this to be like my first original release that actually addresses that, knowing that there’s all these songs in my catalog that I can revisit and release that have female pronouns in them. Because there are a lot, but my management was like, “If you wanna release ’em, you gotta change ’em.” And I was like, “Well, that’s not the song. It’s about somebody, and I’m not gonna make it about somebody else. That’s so stupid.” So it feels great, because that was the last big puzzle piece of me being completely honest.
Of course you’re aware that some people are inherently suspicious of bisexuality, thinking that really everyone who claims that is one way or the other. Regardless of that, just intuitively, it seems very credible, to your fans, that you would go both ways.
Like, in the past, when my hair was literally split down the middle? Yeah, there is definitely a lot of that — especially even within the queer community — that like every bi man is gay and every bi woman is straight. And I think that when you really break that down, people have a hard time believing that men couldn’t be the center of someone’s universe. That’s very problematic, but I think that that is genuinely what it comes down to. And it’s layered. But I have so many queer fans too. So when I came out, I don’t feel like I got a lot of pushback. A few people were like, “Oh, she’s just doing this for attention.” And I’m like, the amount of shit I had to overcome to come out to my parents — trust me, I’m not doing this for attention. I had to like really fight tooth and nail to like get past that, because I grew up so conservative, and who wants to unnecessarily put themselves through that?
You’ve made some appearances for the community recently, including playing Ty Herndon’s annual benefit in Nashville. Out here, you just performed at the OutLoud Festival as part of the West Hollywood’s Pride festival.
It was so fun. To be in spaces like that, you just feel so safe. And having come from country, where a lot of times I was getting on stage in front of a crowd of people that I didn’t even know if they’d be OK if I said “fuck” — it’s not like that in pop, but it’s especially not like that at a pride festival in West Hollywood. I felt like I could get up there and just completely shed any concern about how I would be perceived, and that was really nice and freeing.
Kalie Shorr poses backstage at OUTLOUD Music Festival at 2025 WeHo Pride on May 31, 2025 in West Hollywood, California.
FilmMagic
You were chaneling Shania Twain with your outfit at the pride fest.
My stylist was like, “I think that might be kind of like the gay test.” When she was telling people, “I’m designing this outfit for Kalie Shorr and it’s got the leopard print hood, as a ‘90s reference,” it was always gay people telling her, “That outfit means so much to us.” She’s been very outspoken and supportive of the queer community, which is not always super popular for country artists, so she’s very admired.
You mentioned recently having a song about leaving the evangelical church, but that’s not on this EP, so there must be more music in the pipeline.
Yeah, there’s a song specifically that I posted on social media called “Evolution” that will 100% be coming out, hopefully before the end of the year. I wrote it by myself and the hook is, “We don’t believe in evolution, so everything stays just the same.” I was not allowed to believe in dinosaurs. That is how Christian I grew up, so…
We are working toward a full album and I have songs already recorded for it. I do think that this EP is like the first half of an album. But given that I was coming back from an extended unwilling hiatus, and I had been making all of this dating specific content, I was like, “Let’s get these songs out and really dive into this one layer of, like, my type of person in these toxic relationships. And so these EP songs are kind of isolated to that topic, but then the album really expands from there. Because I think that nobody’s most interesting thing about them is the people they date, and that’s a good thing to remember when you’re defining yourself by your relationships. So this is definitely just one part of that, and then the album really expands on the background of why my type is my type.
Speaking of your type… Paris Hilton seems to be your type. At least, there seems to be a mutual appreciation thing going on in your socials.
I made a fake tabloid thing about myself and Paris Hilton commented and then followed me and sent me a voice message, and I was like, what the fuck? I love her. I love Paris Hilton. … I had commented on a videos of her DJing, because people were holding up signs that were saying, “You’re not playing live.” And she was like, “Yes I am, and you’re just jealous,” and then she goes into “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and it was just so rock ‘n’ roll. And I commented on it and said, “Do you know how cool you have to be to be that hot and that privileged and still have people like almost universally like you? And she said something nice back and then followed me and sent me a voice message saying a bunch of nice stuff… To look down at your phone and see that you have a voice message from Paris Hilton is pretty surreal.
