Jarah Lather
🎤 Artist in the
Spotlight: Jarah Lather
A Voice Built from Life, Resilience and the Need to Create
Some artists begin their journey in professional studios, surrounded by expensive equipment and experienced producers.
Jarah Lather’s story is different.
Her music has been created in bedrooms and basements, on laptops and phones, with an Xbox headset, an iPhone earbuds microphone and eventually a RØDE USB microphone. Not because this was part of some carefully designed lo-fi aesthetic, but because Jarah learned early on to work with what she had.
And perhaps that tells you more about her as an artist than any polished biography ever could.
Jarah is a 39-year-old mother from Warren, Ohio, who has been singing since she was young. Music was always there, but something changed during her teenage years when she discovered Evanescence.
Hearing Amy Lee helped the self-described “angsty teen” discover the possibilities within her own mezzo-soprano voice. The poetry she was already writing began to find another purpose. Words could become songs, and emotions that were sometimes difficult to express could suddenly be given a voice.
It was the beginning of something that would remain with her for years.
Finding Her Own Way
Jarah experimented with singing competitions when she was younger and even won the local Trumbull County Fair Idol competition in 2011.
But she eventually realised that competitions weren't really where she belonged. For Jarah, music wasn't about winning. It was about creating something she herself would want to hear.
She began writing and recording original material as far back as 2007, although it would take until 2024 before she started officially releasing her music. Some of those earlier songs still live on SoundCloud — reminders of a musical journey that continued even when life had other plans. And life certainly had other plans.
One of her songs, Don’t Belong, was partially recorded in 2011 using FL Studio and a proper microphone. Then her computer died, life intervened, and the unfinished song disappeared into the background for almost a decade. Many people would have left it there. Jarah didn't.
Years later, she returned to the song with far more modest equipment: BandLab and the microphone from a simple pair of iPhone earbuds. But by then, the song had acquired an entirely different emotional weight. Jarah was finishing Don’t Belong while escaping an abusive relationship. She remembers hiding in the bathroom whenever she could find an opportunity to record the remaining vocals.
That detail says something important about her music. These aren't songs created because a release calendar says another single is due. They are pieces of a life.
Creating Without Waiting for Perfect Conditions
Limited resources could easily have become a reason to stop making music. Instead, Jarah turned limitation into creativity. For another song, Chaos, she even recorded using an Xbox headset and BandLab before she was eventually able to acquire the RØDE USB microphone she uses today.
The equipment improved, but the philosophy remained the same: use what is available and concentrate on the emotion. Her voice has been described as powerful and haunting, but one of the compliments that has stayed with her most came directly from a listener who told her that her voice gave them goosebumps.
For an artist who wants music to provoke an emotional response, there are probably few better compliments. Then came SALT.
From an Xbox Game to SALT
The beginnings of SALT appeared somewhere Jarah probably wasn't expecting to find her next song: inside a video game. While playing Avowed on her Xbox, she was exploring the game world and reading inscriptions on old tombstones when one of them sparked something. She stopped.
She wrote the idea down in a notebook. And she returned to it later. That small moment eventually grew into an entire song.
But unlike some of her earlier work, SALT wasn't intended to focus solely on Jarah's own pain. This time she wanted to look outward as well. The song became an allegorical response to the world around her, touching on systemic failures and human suffering while carrying a defiant message at its centre:
“Live for your shimmers.”
Creating the recording required the same resourcefulness that has followed Jarah throughout her musical journey. Her basement became her recording space.
For the larger operatic sections and choruses, she used the natural openness and acoustics of the room. When the song needed something closer and more intimate, she built herself a blanket fort. Not exactly Abbey Road Studios. But it worked.
She carefully stacked vocal layers until she had created the enormous wall of sound she was looking for, documenting parts of the process and sharing behind-the-scenes footage with her followers. And Jarah wasn't finished when the recording was done.
Searching for the Image
She wanted the visual world surrounding SALT to feel as authentic as the song itself. So she went exploring. Abandoned factories. Graveyards. Places carrying their own atmosphere, history and scars. Camera in hand, Jarah photographed them while searching for an image that felt right. Eventually, she found it in a graveyard in Newton Falls, Ohio. It became the artwork for SALT.
The journey from a tombstone inscription inside a video game to a notebook, a basement recording space, a blanket fort and finally a real Ohio graveyard might sound unconventional. But perhaps that is exactly why it feels so personal. There was no marketing department constructing a story around the song afterwards. The story was already there.
Music That Leaves a Mark
Jarah Lather isn't pretending that the road has been easy. Her catalogue carries heartbreak, trauma, resilience, experimentation and years of finding ways to keep creating when circumstances weren't ideal. But there is also something refreshingly uncomplicated underneath all of it.
She makes music because she wants to make music. She writes about things she has experienced and things she sees happening around her. She puts everything she can into the vocal performance and hopes that somewhere, somebody hears themselves in it.
That connection matters more to her than fitting into somebody else's idea of what an artist is supposed to be. From singing along with Amy Lee as a teenager to recording vocals in a bathroom during one of the most difficult periods of her life; from an Xbox headset to carefully layered vocals on SALT, Jarah has continued finding a way to create.
Not under perfect circumstances. Not with unlimited resources. But with something far more difficult to manufacture: A story to tell, and the determination to tell it in her own voice. And sometimes, that is where the most interesting artists are found.
Jarah Lather is an independent artist from Warren, Ohio. Her latest release, SALT, is available now on major streaming platforms.