THE PLACES THAT MADE KOHANNA
A voice shaped by movement, memory and the places she has called home.
Some artists seem to belong to a place.
You can hear it in the music before you know where they are from. A city, a landscape, a particular musical tradition becomes part of the vocabulary.
Kohanna is harder to place.
Arizona. Virginia. Baltimore. Nashville. Colorado. Europe. Austin.
Each place has left something behind. None of them seems to have claimed her completely.
That may be the most interesting thing about her music.
Kohanna is an artist whose story is built around movement, but the songs are not simply travelogues. The places she has lived have become part of a longer process of figuring out who she is, what she wants her music to sound like and, perhaps most importantly, whether she still wanted to make music at all.
That last question matters.
Because Kohanna's story is not really about a young artist starting out.
She has been writing and performing for years. Music has already taken her through several different chapters, including a period in Nashville where songwriting became an important part of her development. Her earlier work reaches back to releases including Hometown, released in 2021, while her current music shows an artist still moving rather than settling into a finished identity.
That makes Colorado: Side A particularly interesting.
It feels less like a beginning than a return.
A LIFE IN MUSICAL CHAPTERS
Kohanna was born in Arizona and grew up in Virginia before spending time in Baltimore and Nashville. Colorado became another significant chapter, followed by time in Europe and, most recently, Austin, Texas.
Her own description of the music reflects that geography. She describes the songs as postcards from the places she has lived, carrying love, loss, joy and hope with them.
But there is a danger in telling the story purely through geography.
It would be easy to say Arizona gave her this, Nashville gave her that, Colorado gave her something else.
Real life is rarely that tidy.
The more interesting interpretation is that none of these places completely replaced the one before it.
Nashville did not turn her into a Nashville songwriter.
Colorado did not turn her into a Colorado musician.
Austin does not need to turn her into an Austin musician.
Instead, each place seems to have added another layer.
That is reflected in the music.
Kohanna's current work sits somewhere between indie folk, Americana, roots and soul, with enough movement between those worlds that trying to give her one definitive genre feels less useful than simply listening to what connects them.
The voice is the constant.
The surroundings change.
NASHVILLE, THEN COLORADO
Nashville was an important part of Kohanna's development as a songwriter. Earlier in her career she studied songwriting there, and even in those years she described her musical approach as deliberately open to different styles rather than being tied to one genre.
Then came Colorado.
The change was not simply geographical.
Colorado became a period of growing up, of change and of trying to understand herself more clearly. In an interview about Colorado: Side A, Kohanna described the project as being about coming into herself and understanding who she was as a woman. She also revealed the part of the story that gives the album its real weight:
she stepped away from music.
And then she came back.
That is a very different story from the usual artist narrative.
There is no convenient upward line here. No childhood dream followed by a straight road towards a career.
There was a gap.
A question mark.
And eventually, a return.
That return is all over the idea behind Colorado: Side A.
The album was released in February 2026 and contains nine tracks, including “I Always Knew,” “Miss America,” “La Danse Des Amoureux,” “Comatose,” “Jane,” “Amy” and “Dreams,” ending with a piano version of “La Danse Des Amoureux.”
It feels like a record made from a period rather than a record designed to define an artist forever.
And that distinction matters.
THE SONG THAT LOOKS TOWARD THE MOUNTAINS
“Comatose” is perhaps the clearest way into the record.
Kohanna has described the song as freeing, imagining herself driving through the mountains or even as a bird flying over them. She sees it as a strong representation of the feeling behind Colorado: Side A.
There is something telling in that image.
The mountains are present, but the song is about movement through them.
That is very Kohanna.
The landscape matters because of what it allows her to feel, not because she needs to turn Colorado into a permanent musical identity.
This is where the record becomes more interesting than a collection of songs inspired by a particular state.
Colorado is the setting.
The subject is change.
And the music keeps returning to the question of who you become when your surroundings keep changing with you.
THE RETURN TO THE STAGE
There is another reason Kohanna's story works particularly well as a discovery.
She is not only building music for headphones.
She is a live performer.
Her recent shows have included Stubb's, the Fox Theatre in Boulder, Lost Lake Lounge, the Armory in Fort Collins, Austin Garden & Studio and Saturn ATX. She has also shared stages with artists including Tommy Newport and Steph Strings.
That matters because Kohanna talks about live music in unusually simple terms.
“Live music is where we create a world together,” she has said, describing the experience as something that exists only in that particular moment.
It is a good description of what seems to be happening around her music generally.
The songs come from different places, but they are not trying to preserve those places like photographs.
They are trying to remember what those places felt like.
There is a difference.
AUSTIN IS THE NEXT CHAPTER
In 2025, Kohanna moved to Austin.
By August 2026, she was celebrating a year in the city, describing Austin as a place that had welcomed her and one where she was excited to continue making music. Her current schedule shows an artist becoming increasingly active in the local scene, while her own site describes new music being written for the next phase of her career.
Austin is therefore not the conclusion of the story.
It is the latest chapter.
That distinction is important because there is a temptation, whenever an artist moves to a city with a famous musical history, to immediately place them inside that tradition.
Austin has enough musical mythology to do that all by itself.
But Kohanna has already spent too much of her life moving between worlds for that to be particularly useful.
She can arrive in Austin without having to become an Austin artist overnight.
She can bring Colorado with her.
She can bring Nashville with her.
She can bring Virginia, Baltimore, Arizona and everything that happened in between.
That is what makes the next stage worth watching.
THE VOICE THAT FOUND ITS WAY BACK
Kohanna's latest release, “The Waltzer,” arrived in June 2026, following Colorado: Side A and other 2026 releases including “Card Games” and “Comatose.”
It suggests an artist who is already moving beyond the record that brought her back to music.
That is where we find her now.
Not at the beginning.
Not at the end of a clearly defined career arc.
Somewhere in between.
There is still a lot we do not know about where Kohanna's music will eventually land. Perhaps that is precisely why this feels like the right moment to discover her.
The most interesting artists are not always the ones who have already found the perfect definition.
Sometimes they are the ones who have spent enough time moving to understand that they do not need one.
Kohanna has lived in enough places to know that home can change.
Her music suggests that identity can change with it.
And somewhere between the mountains of Colorado, the songwriting rooms of Nashville and the streets of Austin, she seems to have found something that does not need to move at all.
Her voice.
That is where we are listening now.
