There’s something specific about the way Katherine Appello approaches music. It’s not just about writing songs or putting words to melodies. For the Italian-American artist and blogger based in New York, it’s about tracing the threads of Iberian, Italian, and Levantine heritage and turning that search into something you can actually hear.
Appello started where a lot of writers do: poetry nights at Barnes & Noble during college. That progression from spoken word to songwriting wasn’t a calculated move. She pulls from what she sees, what she reads, sometimes from dreams as she’s falling asleep. It’s the kind of creative process that doesn’t follow a formula, which explains why her music doesn’t sound like it’s following one either.
What she’s making now falls somewhere between folk, pop, and country, but those genres aren’t the point. The point is what she’s saying. Listeners describe her work as heartfelt and moving, which tracks when you consider what she’s actually writing about: ancestry, faith, seasons, the pieces of identity that don’t always fit together cleanly. She’s multilingual, weaving Italian and Spanish into her work, using modern production techniques including AI voices. Listeners and critics have described her soundscapes as moving and diverse, and the work functions as what she describes as an ancestral torchbearer and bridge builder between cultures and generations.
Her influences make sense when you hear her talk about them. Brad Paisley, Alison Krauss, Martina McBride, Celtic Thunder. What ties them together isn’t a specific sound but a commitment to storytelling and faith, to sharing all of life without glossing over the hard parts. That’s where Appello plants her flag too.
Right now, she’s got 22 new songs coming out between January and February, plus a documentary about her ancestry discovery journey set for early March. It’s a lot of output for someone who’s clearly digging deep into personal territory, but that’s part of what she wants people to take from the work: inspiration to explore their own heritage, to build bridges and put an end to hate and antisemitism.
It comes back to those threads she mentioned at the start. Appello’s not just tracing her own lines of Iberian, Italian, and Levantine heritage. She’s asking listeners to do the same, to stand strong in the totality of their own ancestry and use that as a foundation for building rather than destroying. That’s what makes the music work: it’s personal enough to be specific, universal enough to make you look inward. You can find more of her work at N1M, her website, and Instagram.
