Tamar Kaprelian was signed by Clive Davis and Jimmy Iovine. Dropped. Instead of staying in that wreckage, she went and built Nvak Collective — a company that’s educated thousands of women on how to navigate the industry without depending on the gatekeepers who once decided her fate. And now, after a decade behind the curtain learning exactly how the machine works, she’s stepping back in front of the mic with “The Only,” a song she wrote the chorus to fifteen years ago, before motherhood was anything but a theoretical idea.

She wrote it with Ali Tamposi, who had her own baby two days apart from her, left the hospital the same day, and ended up co-writing the song that would eventually pull their friendship back together after a rift. The original version still belongs to Interscope. She didn’t fight for it. She just rewrote it, on her own terms, and somehow that quiet reclamation says more than a legal battle ever could. We talked about postpartum anxiety hidden inside a pastel music video, about the difference between liberation and reclamation, about running a company by day and surrendering to songwriting by night, and about whether there’s a single version of her left underneath all the ones she’s been. And stick around — the music video for “The Only” premieres right here at the end of this interview.

photo by Carly Sharp

Tamar, hey — thanks for sitting down with me. The chorus of “The Only” comes from a song you originally released in 2011 through Interscope. That’s a completely different era of your life — before motherhood, before Nvak, before walking away from the major-label machine and rebuilding everything from scratch. When you sing those words now, do they mean something different than they did fifteen years ago?

Completely. When I wrote those lyrics, motherhood was theoretical. I was writing about a future child I hadn’t met yet. Now, after becoming a mother, building a company, and living through experiences that fundamentally changed me, the song feels less like a message to my son and more like a conversation between every version of myself. What’s remarkable is that my younger self unknowingly co-wrote part of this record. She left me the chorus fifteen years ago. I simply had enough life experience to finally understand what it meant.

Interscope still owns the masters to that original version. You didn’t go to war over it the way Taylor Swift did — you rewrote, reimagined, and quietly took the song back on your own terms. When you sat down to do that, did it feel like liberation?

I don’t think it felt like liberation as much as it felt like reclamation. The original version belonged to a younger version of me—and legally, it still belongs to a system I no longer participate in. What was (and still is) meaningful about “The Only”: I didn’t need to fight for ownership of the past; I could simply create something new. In a strange way, rewriting the song mirrored a lot of my life.  Stop trying to win back what was and start building what is next.

The music video for “The Only” feels like it exists inside a dream — pastel tones, soft light, dancers moving through the frame like something half-remembered. Everything looks gentle, almost weightless, but the song itself carries real emotional gravity. Was that contrast intentional — wrapping something heavy in something beautiful — or is that simply what early motherhood looks like from the inside: overwhelming and tender at the same time?

I think the tension is the point. Motherhood is often portrayed as either blissful or exhausting, when in reality it’s both things in one. It was one of the most beautiful experiences and one of the most destabilizing. The dreamlike quality of the music video was intentional because that’s how memory works—it edits. It softens.

One of the visual motifs in the video is a wall that exists in the physical landscape but functions psychologically. I’ve always been interested in the boundary between our inner lives and outer realities, between what we experience privately and what the world sees. It’s a theme I’ll continue exploring in future releases. The other idea at the heart of the video – time. The first six months of motherhood were extraordinarily difficult for me with postpartum anxiety and yet now I can barely access the texture of that difficulty. What remains is … tenderness. In many ways, that’s what the video is about: how love transforms us, and how memory eventually transforms the experience itself.

You and Ali Tamposi had your babies two days apart, left the hospital on the same day, and then wrote this song together. Do you think “The Only” could have existed if you’d written it alone, or did it need that specific mirror?

I don’t think the song could have existed in quite the same way without Ali. Obviously we were both drawing from the same transformative experience—we had babies two days apart and left the hospital on the same day—so there was a level of understanding that didn’t require translation. We were living through the same profound shift in identity at the exact same moment. But what makes the song even more meaningful to me is that it arrived during a period when our friendship was finding its way back to itself. We had experienced a rift, and in a strange way, motherhood and songwriting became the bridge back. I’ve always believed that creating something with someone is one of the most intimate forms of communication. Sometimes you can write things in a song that are harder to say in conversation. When I listen to “The Only,” I hear a song about motherhood, certainly. But I also hear a song about friendship—about two women being altered by the same life event and finding their way back to one another through the act of creating something together.

Motherhood in pop music has historically been treated as either an ending or an aesthetic. The artist either disappears or turns it into a brand. Very few women have been allowed to explore it as genuine artistic material the way male artists have always explored fatherhood without anyone questioning whether it makes them “less cool.” What does it mean to you to put that experience at the center of a song in an industry that still doesn’t quite know what to do with mothers who make music?

We tend to treat motherhood as a demographic category rather than an artistic subject. I agree. What’s always interested me is that it remains one of the most profound identity shifts a person can experience.  ‘The Only’ was an opportunity to write about that transformation directly—not as an accessory, but as the story itself. I wrote it with two other mothers, and I think what emerged is less a song about parenting than a song about what happens when love rearranges your understanding of yourself.

You were signed by Clive Davis and Jimmy Iovine, then dropped. Instead of staying in that world, you went to Columbia, built Nvak Collective, educated thousands of women, essentially constructed an alternative version of the music industry. Now you’re back as an artist. Did you have to become the person who builds the system before you could trust it enough to be an artist inside it again?

That’s a perceptive question, and I think the answer is yes. For a long time, my relationship with the music industry was defined by dependency. As a young artist, your career often feels contingent on these institutions, gatekeepers, and decisions being made in rooms you’re not in or invited to. Building Nvak changed that. Not because it made me cynical about the industry, but because it gave me agency within it.

Over the last decade, I’ve had the privilege of helping thousands of artists—particularly women—build careers on their own terms. In the process, I stopped seeing the industry as something that happened to me and started seeing it as something I could help shape. Ironically, that made returning to music possible.

I don’t think I needed to build a company before I could become an artist again. But I do think I needed to build a life that wasn’t dependent on being one. And that’s powerful.

Nvak demands strategy, scalability, metrics. A song demands the opposite — it demands that you forget all of that and feel something. How do you move between those two modes, and do they ever bleed into each other in ways that surprise you?

I actually think I need both to be fully myself. Nvak satiates the part of me that loves building systems. It’s strategic, measurable, and tangible. You can make a decision, execute it well, and watch the outcome unfold in real time. There’s something deeply gratifying about that.

Songwriting operates according to a completely different logic. It requires a certain surrender. You have to stop optimizing and start tapping in. The best songs don’t arrive because you’ve engineered them (though I am a deep believer in re-writing and editing, etc).—they arrive because you make yourself available to receive them. What’s surprised me the most: is how complementary the worlds are. Building a company has made me more disciplined as an artist. Being an artist has made me more human as a founder and more relatable to the artists I work with.

You stepped away from your own artistry for years. In that silence, the industry changed completely. You’re returning to a landscape that looks nothing like the one you left. Does that feel disorienting — or does the fact that you helped reshape the industry through Nvak mean you understand this new world better than most artists who never left?

I love it. The music industry feels like the Wild West right now. The old playbook is gone, and nobody can say with certainty how to break an artist anymore. For me, that’s exciting. It turns the entire thing into a living experiment. Building Nvak gave me a front-row seat to the industry’s evolution, so I don’t feel like I’m returning to an unfamiliar world. If anything, I understand it better now than I did when I was signed. What’s changed most is my relationship to the outcome. When I was younger, I was trying to prove something. Today, I’m creating from a place of curiosity. Of course I’d love to have a billion-stream song one day. But now it feels less like validation and more like testing a system I genuinely believe in. And that freedom makes the process far more enjoyable.

“The Only” is about becoming a mother, but underneath that there’s a bigger question — what happens when something as primal as bringing a new life into the world dismantles the identity you spent years constructing. You’ve already reinvented yourself more than once: artist, student, entrepreneur, and now artist again. Is there a core “you” that stays the same through all of that, or does each version feel like a genuinely different person?

Honestly, I think I’m a different person. People talk about motherhood like it’s an addition to your life. For me, it felt more like a renovation. Some rooms stayed the same. Others got completely torn down and rebuilt. I still recognize myself. But I’m not who I was before Sev. And I don’t think I’m supposed to be.

Last one. You’ve occupied almost every seat in the room: artist, songwriter, label founder, educator, mother. You know how the machine works from every angle. Most people with that much behind-the-curtain knowledge would be cynical by now. But “The Only” doesn’t sound cynical at all — it sounds wide open. After everything you’ve seen and built and survived in this industry, how do you still let yourself be emotionally unguarded in a song?

I don’t know that I’ve become less guarded. If anything, being a young woman in the music industry taught me that openness can sometimes be unsafe. There were periods of my life where that vulnerability came with a huge cost. But I also think we’re living through a cultural moment that rewards honesty. People are exhausted by perfection, branding, and carefully curated versions of reality; they’re looking for something human. So while there is certainly risk in being emotionally transparent, I think there’s also power in it. And from both an artistic and strategic perspective, I think authenticity is one of the few things that still cuts through the noise.

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