SINGLE REVIEW: How the #MeToo movement & the relearning that beauty will always outweigh the pain helped Kate Vogel release her debut single “Reasons to Stay” after a 9 year hiatus.
Kate Vogel’s debut “Reasons to Stay” is one of those songs that makes you drop everything.
The warm, sparse piano paired with her vocal carrying the perfect amount of breathiness is the simple invitation into the complexities of humanness. It’s simultaneously an exhale and a deep breath. It’s the kind of song that strips away frills and metaphors and gets to the end of itself.
Kate Vogel was at the end of herself.
She moved to Nashville 10 years ago to pursue music, only to experience “some very bad things, as [what happens] when grown men have control over a teenage girl.” Kate keeps the details hidden as is her choice, and the bad things that occurred kept her from singing for 9 years.
“So much of my life and happiness was stolen from me. I thought I would live and die without ever seeing my songs recorded, and this is what I am referring to in the lines ‘put myself in a box that I’d never be someone I’m proud of.’”
“Reasons to Stay” gave Kate Vogel a reason to return to the universal conversation of music, and is her response to the heaviness and isolation that come from trauma, PTSD, and depression.
It’s the kind of song that unintentionally becomes universally felt by originating from an individual experience. In the second verse she sings “I don’t wanna die I just don’t wanna live.” No matter what level of heaviness in the past you’ve sunken into, whether it’s a mere dip or you’ve found yourself at the very bottom, you know this feeling of being too tired to keep fighting.
The song intentionally meets you in the hopelessness and isolation first to bring you up and out of those places into perspective, truth, and the trust that life is better with you in it.
Kate says she started singing again a year ago thanks to the MeToo movement. She attempted suicide last year, the result of severely untreated PTSD, and when she woke up in the hospital she decided she’d be making music for the rest of her life. She found her purpose and victory in her defeat.
“I don’t feel strong or brave or vulnerable putting this song out, I just feel relieved. I’m so relieved that it can finally be on a medium to reach whoever needs it. This was the first song I knew I could not keep to myself. It belongs to anyone who needs hope and a reminder that the beauty will outweigh the pain.”
