Kat King Is Giving the Past a New Sound

For Kat King, returning to music has meant confronting everything that came before it. The Jackson, Mississippi singer-songwriter, filmmaker, and visual storyteller is creating work where sound, memory, family history, and cinema intersect, turning unfinished pieces of the past into an evolving artistic world.

King was recording professionally by 15, growing up in a family where radio and music were embedded in daily life. Her father, John K. King, and brother, John King Jr., both worked in radio, while King began writing songs and finding her own footing in the studio. She eventually stepped away from performing and spent more than two decades behind the camera, including an award-winning production career in Los Angeles. Her return to music decades later carries the weight of that history.

The Coming Home EP, created with late producer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Rico, moves through electronic, downtempo, lo-fi, bedroom-pop, and soulful textures. Its title captures the larger story unfolding across King’s recent catalog: an artist finding her way back to a creative identity that never entirely disappeared.

Some connections are remarkably literal. “Making Tracks” originated with a lyric King’s father gave her around 1990, which she completed decades later before recording it with Mississippi guitarist Johnny Barranco. “Sunshine Girl” similarly transforms her father’s handwritten lyrics into something distinctly her own, pairing that inheritance with electronic production, guitar, and piano.

These discoveries extend into King Soundtrack, King’s documentary and archival project exploring her family history alongside Mississippi’s radio and recording culture. “My hope is that something in the work creates recognition,” King explains. “The stories are mine, but the feelings don’t have to be.”

Rather than separating musician, filmmaker, and storyteller, King is allowing those identities to converge. Her return is not an attempt to recreate an earlier chapter. It explores what survives between chapters and what can finally take shape when we encounter the past with new eyes.