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Tia Gostelow was just 16 when she wrote her first song, which won triple j’s Indigenous Initiative. She tells Alexandra English how everything — and nothing — has changed

Anyone who has ever strongly disliked their best friend’s boyfriend knows Tia Gostelow’s pain. Do you say something and risk offending your friend? Or do you practise your best fake smile, keep quiet and hope they break up?

There is a secret third option, which the musician discovered when she was 16: you can write a song about it, have it go nuts on triple j and launch an entire music career from it. “My friend was dating this guy who I really didn’t like, and she was just so in love and not seeing what I was seeing,” Gostelow says. “Writing the song was my way of trying to tell her that without ruining the friendship, you know?” The friend didn’t take the hint that “State of Art” was for her but eventually dumped the boyfriend of her own accord.

Well-intentioned but failed sabotage aside, the song still went on to change Gostelow’s life. In 2016, it won triple j’s Indigenous Initiative (Gostelow’s grandfather is an elder from Lama Lama country in northern Queensland), which gave her the opportunity to write music with Thelma Plum, and also took a top five spot in triple j’s Unearthed High. It also sent her to Big Sound, an Australian music industry showcase-festival-conference fusion and one of the country’s best launchpads for emerging musicians. The accolades came seemingly overnight and haven’t really stopped. In 2018, Gostelow released her first album, Thick Skin, and became the youngest winner of Album of the Year at the 2019 Queensland Music Awards. In 2020, she defied the sophomore slump and released Chrysalis, a pop experiment and a rebellion against the country tone of her debut. Now, she’s releasing Head Noise, a return to her roots, both sonic and familial, after moving from Brisbane back to her hometown of Mackay in Queensland.

Of course, like every overnight success, there are years of hard work leading up to the breakthrough. Gostelow has spent most of her life living in remote communities. When she was four, the family moved from Karumba, Queensland, where the population was about 600 people, to Groote Eylandt, a remote island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, about 50 kilometres from the Northern Territory mainland. It’s home to about 2800 people, savannah woodlands and coastal mangroves.

Gostelow’s parents are not musically inclined — her creative parentage comes from Taylor Swift. In 2009, when Gostelow was nine, her parents took her to see Swift’s first Australian performance, at CMC Rocks the Snowys in Thredbo, New South Wales. “I remember seeing her and falling so in love,” Gostelow recalls. “I wanted the sparkly dress, I wanted to play guitar — all of that stuff.” Gostelow’s parents bought her a guitar from eBay. “There weren’t really any music teachers on Groote Eylandt, so I YouTubed, taught myself, and then I couldn’t put the guitar down,” she says. “I was constantly playing Taylor Swift.”

Soon after, the family moved to Mackay, Queensland, and Gostelow began competing at country music festivals across the state. There, she would play with a band she’d never met, performing cover songs in different categories such as vocals, country gospel and country rock. “That’s where I really learnt to play with other people,” she says. From there, it was community events and, once she was in high school, pub nights, where her parents sat in the audience at every gig.

Then “State of Art” happened. She went from being a regular high school kid with musical aspirations to someone for whom a dream was becoming a reality. “It was just so exciting, it was everything that I ever wanted to happen,” Gostelow says. “But it also felt a little isolating because there was nobody else in my town doing the same thing. And at the time, I was 17, my teachers didn’t really understand what I was trying to do. I’d have to go to the careers counsellor, and they’d be like, ‘Okay, that’s cool, but what university do you want to go to?’” Now 23, she’s been a full-time musician for the past five years.

After Chrysalis, Gostelow took a massive break from music, not touching her guitar or writing anything for about a year. After purging herself of her pop cravings for the album, she was drained and needed time out. There was also, of course, the pandemic. “I realised I like the simple life: I’m an old lady at heart. I like making pasta and reading books, staying at home,” she says. The lockdowns and break from music gave Gostelow the space to read and think and, slowly, start writing again. She also started re-listening to the country and folk music she once loved so much. “I had to create Chrysalis to be able to come back to these sounds again and be able to appreciate it a bit more,” she says.

Gostelow wrote most of Head Noise in the States, but says she struggled with what to write about. “I pushed myself to not just write about heartbreak and all the sad things that are going on in my life”, she says with a self-deprecating laugh.

Two weeks out from recording, Gostelow couldn’t shake the feeling that the album wasn’t ready yet. She and a friend had an impromptu, low-stakes jam and ended up writing “I’m Getting Bored of This”, now one of Gostelow’s favourite songs and from the lyrics of which the album gets its title. “I started to see the thread of these thoughts that would come to me and keep me up late at night,” she says. “I struggle to fall asleep because I overthink absolutely everything. I feel like that’s a common thing for so many people. There’s a lot of heavy subject matter [in this album], but hopefully, it’s in a way that people can find comfort.”

In short, it’s an album for the people who wake up at 3am feeling alone, without realising just how many other people are awake at 3am, also feeling alone. So the next time you can’t sleep through a thought spiral, take comfort in knowing that Tia Gostelow is probably up, too.

This article originally appeared in the August 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR. Photographed by Imogen Wilson.