Gatlin

She still isn’t used to fans screaming her lyrics back at her. Maybe she’ll never get used to it. But, there they are, chanting back every word.

As she walks offstage, instead of celebrating her successful set, she goes in for a hug from her manager, then does the same for all her band members. It was a group effort — they’re a family, they support each other — and she knows that better than anyone.

Gatlin Thornton, known professionally as Gatlin, is an indie-pop singer-songwriter based, as of this year, in Los Angeles. Reminiscent of Taylor Swift, Maggie Rogers and the HAIM sisters, Gatlin’s music has listeners spinning around the room, wishing they had heard of her sooner. Her recent single, “What If I Love You,” hit a million streams on Spotify in September.

But her path to this point hasn’t been without its twists and turns — her journey includes dropping out of school, enduring a global pandemic and checking into a psychiatric hospital.

The 23-year-old grew up in Orlando, Florida. She is the oldest of three and was raised in a fairly conservative household, with a father who went to West Point and valued following the rules and doing the right thing.

“I’m close with my family, but haven’t always been, and I feel like that also comes out a lot in what I’m writing about,” Gatlin says.

She was always a creative kid, gravitating toward her church choir and always wanting to be the center of attention. She wrote her first song, “Shooting Star,” at age 3. In kindergarten at Lake Highland Prep, she learned to take the stage confidently, performing in class productions. The first song she would actually play for people on her guitar came when she was 12.

Her mother, Stacy Thornton, remembers Gatlin’s grandmother buying a karaoke machine when Gatlin was 4. Gatlin would sing with her 12-year-old cousin, who barely got any time on the mic.

“She just wouldn’t give up the microphone,” Thornton says. “She stuck her finger up to her older cousin and just looked at him and said, ‘I’m not finished yet.’”

When she was young, Gatlin was always happy, Thornton says. She did well in school and had plenty of friends.

“Her only care in the world was that she was harder on herself,” Thornton says. “Getting a B, that just didn’t happen.”

Around ninth grade, there was a shift in Gatlin. She noticed, her family noticed — something was different. Her mother attributes it to being torn between academics and music.

Gatlin was diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder and situational depression. She started going to therapy, which she says was a big deal where she lived and was still stigmatized.

She made the difficult decision to be homeschooled from 10th to 12th grade, getting all her social interaction from her church, where she was very involved. She was able to focus on her music full-time, but that meant letting go of her dream to attend an Ivy League university and pursue an academic profession.

“I think that was challenging for her,” Thornton says. “To leave everything she’d ever known and the life that she thought she was going to lead.”

After graduating, she enrolled at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, to study songwriting. There, she met Jeanette Porcello, who would become her manager. They were in Bear House Writer Management, a student organization at Belmont, together and were partnered for the semester.

“I was just so passionate about her music that I wanted to keep working together beyond that,” Porcello says.

She officially became Gatlin’s manager in 2018. Gatlin began releasing music in her first year at Belmont. After two years there, Gatlin made another challenging decision — to drop out of college.

She loved her professors, but she was starting to have to book sessions around her classes. It was time to take the plunge.

Her first big hit came in December of 2019 with “Talking To Myself.” Especially after the pandemic hit in 2020, the song resonated with people, and now has over 4 million streams on Spotify.

She released her “Sugarcoated” EP in 2020, and her sophomore EP, “To Remind Me of Home,” came out this June.

Her favorite songs on the EP are “What If I Love You,” a bouncy fan favorite, and “Hospital,” an emotional ballad that details her stay in a psychiatric hospital.

When Porcello first heard “Hospital,” she wasn’t sure if it would ever be released. It was so raw and honest, she thought maybe Gatlin had just written it for herself.

“Her releasing that was vulnerable and shows that, as an artist, she is going to get real with her audience,” Porcello says. “She’s resilient. It shows how strong she is, the stuff that she has gone through, and she still has such a strong work ethic. I think it’s awesome that she’s opening up conversation around all that.”

“You can tell someone to take care of themselves and work on themselves, but it’s easier said than done, especially when you don’t have the same experiences or haven’t lived through what that person is living through,” says Sean McHugh, Gatlin’s guitarist.

The two have been inseparable ever since they met in their Belmont days; Gatlin says he’s like a brother to her.

McHugh says that the onset of COVID was a hard time for many musicians, who found themselves suddenly without work. Gatlin and her band were no exception.

“Her career, as well as our career, started moving forward, and all of a sudden it was a quick stop,” McHugh says. “We were all kind of not doing OK. And then, shit just happens. That’s what she needed at the time, was just to take a step back, stop everything, just focus and figure this out.”

While her struggle was hard to watch as someone who loves her, McHugh knew he needed to be there for Gatlin.

“Because when the roles are reversed, we all go through those really terrible times,” McHugh says. “If I ever go through that, I need someone like her.”

By contrast, it has been a joy to watch Gatlin’s successes over the last year. She has finally been able to go on tour again, even returning to Nashville. “What If I Love You” is shaping up to be her most commercially successful song yet, and she continues to receive messages from fans who relate deeply to “Hospital.”

“I want people to feel seen by whatever art I create and I want people to feel understood and known,” Gatlin says. “I guess it’s like, ‘OK, what do I want?’ So then that’s what I want [for other people].”

Gatlin hopes her legacy will extend beyond her discography.

“I want to be remembered for my music, but then also as being someone who lifts people up and sees people for who they are, and letting them know they’re not too much or too little.”