Nightbirde has had it in her since the beginning. She penned her first lyrics at the tender age of 6, helping her mother compose an original piece about the Christmas star, a song that she later performed for more than 800 people at their rural Ohio church. 

Most of Nightbirde’s music experience comes from her church background, but during her college years, she discovered a different voice. At the university she attended, she admits that she wasn’t quite good enough to make it on the campus church’s stage, “That’s when I started writing music on my own that wasn’t meant to be performed in church.” 

She first recorded her original music in 2012, a three-song acoustic EP called Lines. The songs grabbed a lot of attention in her college town, and she began performing and building an audience. The next year, she released Ocean & Sky, an organic and optimistic 6-song folk EP. 

After a move to Nashville in 2015, she took a sabbatical from writing and performing. Two years later, she was preparing to release new music under the pop moniker “Nightbirde.” But life took a dramatic turn as she was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. 

Nightbirde went into remission in 2018, and soon after, hit the studio to record “Girl in a Bubble,” a nod to the alien experience of illness. The song was released in the spring of 2019, and that year, she opened for Grammy-award-winning artist, Tori Kelly, in the same arena on her college campus that she was never quite good enough to reach before.

“That show was the resurrection of a dream for me,” she says, “It felt like a wink from God, saying, ‘you’re good enough to do this, kid.’”

The glory moment didn’t last for long. Months later, she was diagnosed again, but this time, given a 3-6 month life expectancy, and a 2% chance of survival. In the midst of a global pandemic and an explosive divorce, she took a leap of faith to a clinic in Southern California. She miraculously recovered; Six months after her diagnosis, she was declared cancer-free. 

Recording new music was the first order of business, and she doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. “When I was in the thick of illness, I swore to myself that I would write the songs that people need to get through those times, and that’s what I’ll do.”