About eight years ago, amid what seemed like a relatively successful albeit not quite superstar music career, Natalie D-Napoleon posted on social media that she was done with music. I’d met the Australian singer/songwriter soon after she’d come to Santa Barbara in 2008, and I was shocked to see her — of all the mostly making it musicians in town — be the one to hang up the guitar.
“I poured all my hopes and dreams into it,” she told me last December over Zoom from her home in Fremantle, Australia, which is also where she grew up. “I played every sticky-carpeted pub, from Perth in Western Australia to Stockholm, Sweden, to shows in Arizona and Texas. I was just burned out.” Instead, she started working toward a master’s in creative writing, taught in the writing center at SBCC, and wound up writing poetry instead of the novel she’d planned to do.
“I didn’t quit music altogether,” she explained. “I quit my career aspirations for music.” But she kept playing for herself, and upon completing her master’s, she went out and bought a new Gibson Songwriter guitar.
