Written by: Oliver Heffron
Catie Turner is the kind of person who starts a Zoom interview with the avatar of a beret stacked atop a real, identical beret; she wins you over immediately. While I can say I’ve never seen two berets on one head, I shouldn’t have been surprised to have been so charmed. Since her blowing up on TikTok with her viral, self-deprecating 2021 hit “God Must Hate Me,” Turner has amassed over 100M streams and 1 million followers due in large part to her offbeat sense of humor, but mostly because she’s a gifted songwriter.
Currently, Catie Turner finds herself at the culmination of a transformative year marked by a promising evolution in her releases and rising confidence in her voice. Her new single, “Shrinking Violet,” is a groovy, bittersweet reflection on aging, insecurity, and the inability to outrun the irrational childhood fears that define us. It follows up “Grow Out of You,” a vivid, cinematic ode to confusing feelings for a best friend.
Growing up in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, Turner describes her upbringing as “normal,” and adds that there wasn’t anything around her really pushing her towards a music career: “I didn’t grow up in a musical family whatsoever. I grew up in a family with a remarkable ability to have no talent, like we just weren’t good at sports or the best at academics. So I don’t know how the hell music found me, but thank God it did, and now I’m here.”
Turner’s life took a drastic turn after an audition for American Idol, where she was unexpectedly accepted. She remembers, “It was such a pipe dream, and I was pretty content going to the local community college and then doing the Disney College Program—like that is how big my aspirations went, working minimum wage, maybe as Anna and Elsa at Disney World. My mom pushed me to audition for American Idol. That’s really how it started, with me even seeing it as a possibility for myself.”
Turner went on to capture a national audience with her original song “21st Century Machine,” and hasn’t looked back since. Reflecting on the experience, she says, “It felt like I crammed in about 10 years of life experience into six months. It really did feel like how there’s BC, and then after—like I started living at 18, like, I became conscious, and I was like, holy shit.”
Photo Credit: Helen Showalter
While American Idol may have gotten her foot in the door, Turner spent years struggling to get her music career started, eventually leading her to write a song in an ultimate moment of vulnerability called “God Must Hate Me.” “It almost led me into a religious psychosis,” Turner explains. “Because I wrote that song, being like, ‘God, I’m just gonna quit music. This is terrible.’ Then, all of a sudden, that’s the one that blows up. And I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me. Oh my god.’ Like the irony was not lost on me.
“It’s always the ones you least expect,” Turner says. “The first video I posted with that song going viral was literally me depressed in a bathtub. That is how down bad I was. I was listening to ‘Liability’ by Lorde in the fucking bathtub, thinking, ‘What is this all for?’ And then it became the biggest song in my catalog.”
It’s the balance she hits again and again: the humor, the self-drag, and the strangely grounded wisdom hiding beneath both. Her newer songs feel sharper in that way—still diary-like, still emotionally impulsive, but clearer about what the impulses are trying to say.
That clarity cuts through on “Not Young, Just Dumb,” a track about the moment you realize the excuses you relied on at 18 don’t work anymore. “When I was 18 and 19, I could get really drunk and it was cute,” she says. “And then suddenly you’re in your 20s, and your friends are annoyed because they have to drag your ass home. Now it’s like, you should know better. What are you doing?”
Turner laughs as she tells the story, but the song doesn’t flinch from the sting of that realization—the internal shift from coming-of-age to simply coming to terms with yourself.
Her new single, “Shrinking Violet,” pushes that theme into something gentler and more universal. “It’s about how maybe you’re getting older, but goddammit you still feel the same feelings you did when you were seven at a sleepover calling your mom to pick you up,” she explains. “It’s for all the girls who thought they were slaying Hide and Seek until they realized 30 minutes later nobody was fucking looking for them.”
The title hits close to home. “I was very, very shy as a kid. I’d stand on the wall and be very unsettling and then wonder, ‘Why is no one talking to me?’ In retrospect, girl, I was literally a shrinking violet.”
That blend of self-awareness and comedy also shapes “Grow Out of You,” which Turner wrote while catching feelings for a best friend she knew better than to date. “I had to remind myself: you will grow out of this. Do not ruin the friendship,” she says. “It was literally like when I was 13 and obsessed with emo bands. I grew out of that. I’ll grow out of this too.”
Across all these new releases, Turner sounds steadier—still spiraling, still funny, but rooted in a voice that finally feels entirely her own.
And she’s not slowing down. “For 2026,” she says, grinning, “I plan on becoming even more oversaturated. I plan on spamming everyone.”