QSC aspiring interview: Gatlin on coming out & her Taylor Swift album clash

After leaving her deeply religious home state of Florida, Gatlin discovered herself as an alternative pop and Americana artist when relocating to Nashville, and then Los Angeles. After the huge success of singles such as What If I Love You, it’s all been building up to the release of her debut album, The Eldest Daughter, which deals with coming out, depression, and finding herself away from her religious upbringing. And with Taylor Swift’s recent album announcement, she learned that not only were they dropping records on the same day, but that the new Swift LP has a track called Eldest Daughter. She speaks to Headliner about her mixed emotions about that coincidence, and how her complicated relationship with her home state is the beating heart of her first album.

For an artist who has only been releasing music since 2019, it’s highly impressive that Gatlin was recently named Spotify's GLOW Spotlight Artist for the month of September, showing what a rising star she is as an LGBTQ artist. This achievement was put up in big lights on a Times Square billboard in New York, only reiterating that Gatlin is one to watch. Her 2019 debut single was Maniac, which she followed with her debut EP Sugarcoated, which was far more successful than your average first EP would ever aspire to be.

It’s essentially impossible to interview Gatlin and not have Florida come up. Despite moving to Nashville and then L.A. to pursue music, besides just being easier places to live as a gay person, her home state is still with her, whether it’s processing old things from her childhood, or a sense of place and home remaining a huge part of her lyrics and songwriting.

“Going back and writing my first album about who I am and where I come from, I have been able to realise and process a lot of complicated emotions with it,” she says, with her sentences ending in trademark L.A. vocal fry. “It's definitely a right-wing political state to grow up in. But it's also just weird. Florida makes a lot of headlines for being quite odd. I also have so much appreciation for my childhood and the way I grew up. It was fun getting to write about and process so much of where I grew up and why I am the way that I am.”

Reading the lyrics of one of her new singles, Jesus Christ and Country Clubs, it’s perhaps surprising to learn that Gatlin was raised in a religious household. "I really dove into Evangelical Christianity and found a lot of comfort in it at first, because it's just an automatic belonging. There was a lot of Christian music and worship music when I was young. By the time I got into high school, I was counting down the days until I could leave. I was feeling like the black sheep of the family then. I think high school is rough for a lot of people, though.”

Her first release in 2019, the single Maniac, shows an artist who was already so accomplished in her songwriting, lyrics, and finding a sound. It’s alternative pop that simultaneously shows the melancholy in Gatlin’s lyric writing and music, but still has the delight of listening to a pop song.

“It was my sophomore year of college,” she recalls. “I was a songwriting major in school, and just wrote the song and put it out. Then, I was in a class learning about music publishing, and I had told everyone that I had a song coming out. That evening, my professor was driving and heard it on the local radio. The local national radio had played it, and I think that was such a cool moment for a first song to come out. It felt very encouraging, and I thought, ‘okay, maybe this is the right path, and I'm getting encouragement from this community.’”

A year later came Gatlin’s debut, six-track EP, Sugarcoated. It achieved the kind of streaming numbers that most artists take years and a series of EPs and albums to achieve. Tracks like Talking To Myself see her unique blend of pop, hints of Americana and country, pop-rock, and modern production.

“People keep going back to these songs and are getting hyper-fixated with them,” she says. “I've even noticed now, a lot of people who have familiarity with me and my name, it is Sugar Coated that really brought them in and made them feel seen. I think people just go back to those songs again and again.”

She also noticed this was the first time she became connected to a certain Taylor Swift, at least algorithmically, on this occasion. It was the song “What If I Love You? which stands out with streaming, and that was just the Spotify algorithm. We've never really found an exact explanation why, but anytime Taylor Swift would put out new music, that song would play after her new music, algorithmically. It’s so random, weird, unexplainable, and quite insane luck that no one could have created it; the algorithm just made it happen.”

Gatlin’s 2025 was heralded by the first single from The Eldest Daughter, If She Was A Boy. It’s a feel-good bop, with synth drums underpinning laidback guitars, a groovy bassline, and Gatlin’s subtle yet powerful vocal delivery.

In terms of choosing this as the song to launch the album campaign, she says, "It felt like a good reintroduction after a while of not putting out new music. This album feels like a new era and a new version of me. This track is one of the poppiest, if not the poppiest, so it felt like a good bridge from my older music into more of the Americana rock, indie-leaning stuff. It felt light because a lot of the other tracks are lyrically very heavy topics. I actually wrote If She Was A Boy with a UK writer and producer, and we made it in London, which was really fun.”

Mentioning the heavier topics on the album nicely tees up Jesus Christ and Country Clubs, which deals with her Floridian upbringing. Sonically, the tone is certainly darker, which is just as well, as she sings, “I'd rather be out on the road left for dead than down there.”

“I had started processing everything after I moved to Nashville,” she recalls. “I was realising who I am and realising I was queer, and that I don't have the same political or religious beliefs that I was raised with. That was really hard for the people I grew up with to come to terms with. There was a lot of anger and pushback. So I wrote this song a little more out of anger, and the realisation that I wasn’t going to fit into this way of thinking that people wanted me to. And it's funny that it came out during this administration in America, because it’s really going against what's happening in America right now: the type of Christianity you see within MAGA, and the hypocrisy of hate in the name of religion – I want no part of it.”

The Eldest Daughter dropped on October 3rd, and, like every other major event in the world that day, was overshadowed by the release of another album, The Life of a Showgirl by billionaire superstar Taylor Swift. And while Gatlin has inadvertently managed to jump on the algorithm coattails of the world’s most famous musician previously, she initially had mixed feelings, especially when she learned Swift even had a song on her album called Eldest Daughter. But she eventually came round to embrace the positives.

“I was slightly conflicted at first,” she says. “I think a lot of artists find a lot of worth in their individuality. Initially, I was worried that my album wouldn’t be able to stand on its own and would always have this kismet connection to Taylor. What If I Love You had the Spotify algorithm looking out for me and fed it to Swifties. I’m forever grateful for that. After the initial shock, I shifted my perspective. This is someone I have been a lifelong fan of and who I heavily respect. I read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic a few years ago, where she talks about ideas being alive and artists just being the vessels. I take this as a sign that I am sometimes tapped into whatever energy whirlpool that Taylor Swift is in. Hayley Williams released a solo project recently and mentioned being an eldest daughter in her lyrics. It’s a year for the eldest daughters, and if I get to be a small part of that, then that’s pretty fucking sick.”

Bearing in mind Gatlin’s journey of self-discovery in both her personal and artistic life, she is the perfect person to ask what the phrase Play Out Loud means to her. “I would say to be loud about who you are and be proud of who you are. With this album and my music, it's me proclaiming who I am as a person and what I believe in. And being loud and proud about that and sharing what I've made.”

The Eldest Daughter is out now — go and give it a listen to make a small dent in the numbers of the slightly more famous popstar who dropped her album on the same day. “If you wanted to start with just one song, I’d say to start with If She Was A Boy,” Gatlin concludes. “It’s a light one to enter my little music world. And then if you like that, you can dive a little deeper.”