Tamar Kaprelian’s powerful new single “The Only” marks a deeply personal return to her own artistry after years of major success as a songwriter, manager, and founder of Nvak Collective.
Signed by Clive Davis and Jimmy Iovine at just 18, Tamar has navigated the highs and lows of the music industry, including burnout and being dropped. Now, as a mother and entrepreneur, she reclaims her voice on her own terms, revisiting and reworking material from her past while confronting themes of ambition, care, and identity.
In this interview, Tamar opens up about the catalyst that pushed her to release new music, how motherhood reshaped her creative lens, the emotional process of reclaiming her Interscope-era song “Raining in Paradise,” and the driving philosophy behind Nvak Collective and Foundation. She also shares hard-earned lessons about the music business, building sustainable careers, and creating safer spaces for artists.
“The Only” marks a return to your own artist project after major success as a songwriter. What made this the right moment to step back into your own voice?
I have been writing these songs quietly for nearly two years, beginning in the summer of 2024 after one of my artists fired me as her manager. A month before that, she made an offhand remark that stayed with me—something to the effect of how strange, even unfitting, it would be for me to return to releasing my own music. It wasn’t meant as encouragement, but it became a catalyst.
I’ve always carried a strong sense of self-belief—perhaps to a fault. I believed then and still do now that I could hold it all at once: manage artists, write for others, run a business, be present as a mother, and still claim space as an artist myself. These songs came from interrogating that assumption—what it costs, what it reveals, and what stays intact when you decide to prioritize your own voice seriously again.
The song is rooted in your experience of becoming a mother. How did that shift your perspective as a writer and storyteller?
Motherhood is scary, crazy, and unpredictable. Prior to having my son, I was frightened by how this process was going to alter my freedom, my relationship with my husband, and my relationship with my own body.
It definitely did all of those things and more. But for the most part, I would say the shifts were for the better.
What I began to understand is that motherhood was not a new lens so much as one I had been looking through all along. Even before becoming a mother in the literal sense, I had been inhabiting that role—in my work, in my relationships, in the way I tend to people and ideas.
So the English major in me decided to follow that thread deliberately. The songs map a series of relationships I’ve had to nurture, renegotiate, or let go of in this season: my business, my artists, my team, my closest friendships, and my business partnership. Motherhood became less a singular experience and more a framework—a way of understanding care, responsibility, and the quiet (and often unthanked) cost of holding so much.
The chorus is pulled directly from a song you released through Interscope in 2011, which they still own. Walking back in and reclaiming that material the way Taylor Swift did with her catalog, what did that feel like creatively and emotionally?
“Raining in Paradise” was always one of the songs I held closest from the Interscope days—an homage to Billy Joel’s Lullaby, and, in many ways, a lullaby of my own, written for a child I didn’t yet have.
More than a decade later, I found myself newly a mother, in the thick of it—exhausted, altered, and already fielding questions about what might come next. Returning to that song in 2024 felt less like nostalgia and more like a confrontation with a former self: the woman who imagined motherhood from a far, far distance and the one now living inside it.
Writing “The Only” became a way of bridging those two selves. It was, in part, an act of reclamation—taking back something I had made and understanding it anew. But it was also a way of working through a quieter anxiety: the fear of disappearing into motherhood entirely. And ultimately, it became something much more resolved—a song that honors my son and acknowledges a sense of completeness I hadn’t anticipated, a feeling that, with him, I am complete.
You were signed by Clive Davis at 18 and later by Interscope and then dropped. You’ve talked openly about burnout and questioning whether you even loved music anymore. What does it mean to come back now on your own terms rather than someone else’s?
I came up in a system that, even then, felt fundamentally misaligned. The major label model was built to manufacture moments—break artists, scale them aggressively, and move on just as fast. That machinery hasn’t evolved; if anything, it’s become more reactive, chasing virality rather than cultivating longevity and prioritizing artist health. And virality, as the business once understood it, is no longer a reliable foundation for a career. (I never thought it was, to begin with).
What I’ve come to believe instead is far subtler and far more durable. Artists must build from the ground up now—brick by brick, interaction by interaction. It’s less about being discovered than it is about being known. Responding to messages, fostering connection, and writing songs that are precise and deeply felt—those are the things that endure.
Coming back on my own terms means rejecting the urgency and external validation that once defined success for me. It’s a return to something more deliberate: a practice rooted in craft, in honesty, and in a sustained relationship with the people who are actually listening.
What are the biggest misconceptions about “making it” in the music industry that you’ve come to challenge through your journey?
Getting signed doesn’t mean you’ve “made it.” You have not crossed a threshold into stability or success. In reality, it’s often just the beginning of a far more complicated chapter.
Because what follows is rarely linear. It’s a long, bipolar process shaped as much by disappointment and recalibration as it is by progress. You learn quickly that “making it” is an ongoing negotiation—with the industry, with your expectations, and with yourself.
What was the turning point where you realized you didn’t just want to participate in the industry but actually build something like Nvak Collective?
Building Nvak Collective was not an act of ambition so much as one of necessity. It became a kind of architecture I could step into—something that created distance between myself and the more extractive elements of the industry, while still allowing me to engage with it on my own terms. In that sense, it functioned as both a shield and a framework: a way of reestablishing agency in a space where it had often felt elusive.
But it was also, perhaps more importantly, a way of finding alignment. In building Nvak, I began to encounter others—executives, creatives, operators—who approached the work with a similar ethos: thoughtful, artist-first, and resistant to the more transactional impulses that tend to dominate the business. What emerged was not just a company but a kind of ecosystem—one that reflected the way I wanted to work and the conditions under which I believed artists could actually sustain themselves, creatively and otherwise.
Nvak Collective focuses on markets that the traditional industry largely ignores, the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Eastern Europe. Why those regions specifically? What are they sitting on that the mainstream hasn’t figured out yet?
At its core, the focus is guided by a simple belief: talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not. The global music industry has long operated within a relatively narrow set of geographic and cultural centers, reinforcing the same pipelines, the same narratives, the same assumptions about where value originates.
The regions we work in—the Middle East, North and East Africa, and Eastern Europe—exist largely outside of that framework, not because of any lack of artistry, but because of a lack of infrastructure and attention. What you find there, as a result, is work that feels less mediated—less shaped by the expectations of a global marketplace and more rooted in place, in language, in culture.
What draws me to those artists is not simply the disparity in opportunity, but the quality of the storytelling itself. There is a specificity, a depth, that hasn’t been flattened by overexposure. The mainstream industry, in many ways, has yet to fully understand how to engage with that without diluting it.
Nvak is an attempt to meet those artists where they are—to build pathways that don’t require them to translate or compromise the essence of what they’re making. It’s less about “discovering” something new and more about recognizing what has been there all along, waiting for the right conditions to be seen.
The Nvak Foundation was founded partly in response to the sexual harassment you experienced as a young artist. How does that personal history translate into internal policy and the way Nvak protects the artists you work with?
In many ways, Nvak—and the Foundation in particular—are direct responses to what I experienced as a young artist. Looking back, what was most striking was not just the behavior itself (which was abhorrent) but the absence of intervention. There were people in my “team” in positions of authority—my managers, publishers, and executives—who were not only aware but chose not to act. The silence around it was as instructive as the behavior.
At Nvak, we maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward harassment or predatory behavior—but more importantly, we’ve built an environment where artists feel supported, heard, and, crucially, believed. That isn’t aspirational; it’s operational.
There are clear, non-negotiable boundaries around what is and isn’t acceptable—across the board. That standard applies not only to partners and industry counterparts but also to the artists themselves. The expectation is mutual accountability. Creating a safe environment isn’t just about protection; it’s about establishing a culture where respect is foundational and where no one operates outside of it.
Between Nvak Collective, Nvak Foundation, Song Start, and now your own artist project, you’re running several very different things simultaneously. How do those identities coexist without one drowning out the others?
Each of these entities exists to serve a distinct purpose, and I’ve come to see them less as competing identities and more as parallel expressions of the same underlying ethos.
The Collective is, at its core, about infrastructure—creating a model where artists can maintain their independence while still accessing high-level, tailored support. It’s a response to the gaps I experienced firsthand: a way of building the kind of system I wish had existed.
The Foundation operates in a different register. It’s focused on care and education—particularly for women and girls—addressing the parts of the artist experience that are often overlooked or deprioritized. If the Collective is about building careers, the Foundation is about sustaining the people within them.
Song Start was something else entirely—more ephemeral and more personal. It was a short-term project I built with one of my closest friends, Ali Tamposi, rooted less in structure and more in joy. It gave us a way to create together, outside of the usual pressures, while also giving something back.
How does “The Only” set the tone for what’s next in your artist project?
“The Only” feels like a kind of thesis statement for what I’m building now. It holds a lot of the tensions I’ve been living inside of—the pull between ambition and presence, between giving so much of yourself to others and trying to remain intact within that.
It’s also, in a quieter way, a declaration of limits. A recognition that I don’t have to do everything, or be everything, to feel complete. That realization has shaped not just the song but the body of work that follows.
What comes next continues in that vein—songs that are less concerned with scale or performance and more with clarity. They’re rooted in lived experience, in relationships that have shifted or deepened, and in the ongoing effort to understand what it means to care for something—whether that’s a child, a partnership, or a creative life—without losing yourself in the process.
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