How Taylor turned storms, survival, and a Weather Channel melody into BombÖ

Long before there was BombÖ, there was Kirby, Arkansas, a small Pike County town with fewer than a thousand people when Taylor was growing up. The Crater of Diamonds State Park sat only a short drive away, close enough that it sounds like exactly the sort of place every local school would treat as an obvious field trip. Apparently not. “It’s literally right down the road,” Taylor says, before adding with the dry timing that surfaces throughout the conversation, “but we never got field trips there from school.”

Taylor is careful not to retrofit her childhood into something darker than she remembers. Asked directly what growing up was like, she describes it as “actually very, very good.” Her parents divorced when she was around ten or eleven, but she remembers no spectacular collapse and says they remain on good terms today. She describes both as good parents. The harder parts came from the world around that family. When asked what was most difficult about growing up in southwestern Arkansas, the first word out of her mouth is “poverty.” Unless your family owned one of the restaurants or businesses in town, she remembers, people struggled.

Being gay there added another layer. Kirby was deeply religious, with the expected future laid out in a way that left little room for improvisation. “There was a church on every corner,” Taylor says. “Everybody in these heteronormative lifestyles, pushed very heavily. Blue-collar husband and everything.” She spent years knowing that whatever life she wanted probably existed somewhere beyond the town limits. “It’s rough to get out of that,” she says. “I was just aching to leave for many, many years.”

Music offered one of the first exits. Her father supplied AC/DC, eighties rock, hair metal, and Metallica. Her mother brought country, especially Shania Twain. Taylor still talks about Up! with unusual affection, fascinated by the idea that the same collection of songs could be rearranged and presented in different musical forms. “I think that is one of the coolest records ever,” she says. “That’s what I remember growing up listening to over and over.” If you want to put teenage Taylor back in a room with her dad, play “Thunderstruck.” She began learning guitar around sixteen and remembers learning the song specifically for him.

AFI occupied another corner of her teenage brain. The first full album she specifically remembers needing to own was Decemberunderground. Its June 6, 2006 release date gave teenage Taylor a compelling reason to drag her mother to Walmart. “I was like, ‘Mom, it came out on 6/6/06,’” she says. “She was so mad. But she let me buy it.” Her first real concert was Evanescence in 2012 at what was then Verizon Arena. She was front row while MTV filmed the performance, close enough that she can still point people toward footage online and tell them where to look for her. She even left with the set list. “That was my best first show ever,” she says.

Then came Halestorm. Taylor calls them her favorite band in high school and says she became close enough to the band and its fan community that she traveled with other fans to see them. At eighteen, the Halestorm logo became her first tattoo. Frontwoman Lzzy Hale mattered beyond the music. Hale had spoken openly about being bisexual, giving teenage Taylor one of the few visible queer figures anywhere near the music she loved. “Lzzy’s words and stuff resonated a lot,” Taylor says. Halestorm became part of her teenage years and, as she puts it, part of her growth.

Yet the influence that best explains BombÖ may not be AC/DC, AFI, Halestorm, Evanescence, or even the dubstep explosion that later sent Taylor toward Skrillex and early beat-making apps. It may be the Weather Channel. Taylor almost sounds embarrassed when she realizes it in real time. “Okay, so, the Weather Channel,” she says. “The Local on the 8s. Hear me out.” She remembers the jazzy, mellow instrumental beds playing behind local forecasts and suddenly connects them to the atmospheric electronic music she has been chasing ever since. “That’s probably exactly where my music taste came from,” she says. “I know for a fact that’s where that came from. I just remembered that.” Somewhere between AC/DC and a regional forecast, the basic vocabulary of BombÖ was already taking shape.

Taylor came out in tenth grade, although by her telling her friends were mostly waiting for her to acknowledge something they had already figured out. “They all knew before,” she says. “It was very obvious looking back. I was very tall and boyish.” Accepting it herself was harder. She tried dating boys while already knowing internally that she was attracted to women, hoping perhaps that participating in the life everyone around her expected would somehow change what she knew. “I thought maybe if I try, maybe this is just a thing, maybe I date a boy or whatever and it fixes it,” she says. “Because internally you’re fighting it so hard, because the heteronormative lifestyle around you is pushed so heavy.”

Her family reacted in three very different ways. Taylor initially told her mother she was bisexual rather than lesbian, reasoning that leaving open the theoretical possibility of eventually being with a man might make the revelation easier to accept. Her mother barely spoke to her for roughly three days even though they lived in the same house. “It hurt my feelings a lot,” Taylor says. Eventually, her mother came back and told her what she needed to hear: “I still love you. You’re still my daughter.” Her father responded mostly with silence and then handed her a Bible. He told her he loved her, but sexuality never became much of an ongoing conversation between them. Years later, Taylor says, he loves her girlfriend and is comfortable with their relationship.

Her grandmother dispensed with the entire drama in a matter of seconds. Taylor told her while they were driving together. “I turned to her and I said, ‘Granny, I’m a lesbian.’ And she looked at me and said, ‘Honey, I don’t care. I still love you. You’re still my granddaughter.’” Taylor still sounds delighted by the simplicity of the response. “That’s exactly how this should go,” she says. “How is this hard for people?”

At eighteen, Taylor tried another route out of Arkansas and joined the Army National Guard. Meteorology had been the dream, and college assistance offered what looked like a practical route toward it. The problem was that Arkansas did not have the program she wanted, which meant crossing state lines and paying for a path the Guard benefits were not going to cover the way she had imagined. Taylor still went to basic training but left roughly five weeks in. In a follow-up conversation she is careful about the distinction. “I did join,” she says. “I did join and then I just left during basic training.” She says she was formally processed out with a general discharge under honorable conditions. The meteorology plan disappeared. Her desire to leave Arkansas did not.

There was already a deeper wound underneath all of this. More than a decade ago, before she met the woman she would eventually marry, Taylor attempted suicide. She pulled the trigger and it jammed. She still cannot explain why. “I couldn’t tell you,” she says. What she remembers most clearly is what happened immediately afterward. “I bawled and immediately regretted it. It didn’t feel like my hand after that.” Years later, the experience became a line in “Roll the Dice”: “Pull the trigger, it’s jammed.” There is no complicated symbolism hiding underneath it. The lyric is autobiographical. “There’s a reason I’m alive,” Taylor says.

The years that followed are harder for Taylor to arrange cleanly because, as she puts it, “there’s a lot of that time frame that’s fuzzy.” She says she struggled with addiction from sixteen until twenty-two and met the woman who would eventually become her wife around twenty. Then came years of movement: Phoenix, Colorado, Seattle, Fayetteville, and other places that blur together when she looks back. Sometimes Taylor stayed somewhere six months, sometimes a year, then another major move came. “It was just nonstop,” she says. “It was so fucking exhausting.”

Phoenix was the bottom. In 2016 and 2017, Taylor was homeless, sleeping in a Dodge Charger and stealing food to survive. She stayed near central Phoenix because the light rail and buses gave her a way to move around. “I was at a very low point then,” she says. “I was a totally different person.” She remembers riding public transportation late at night and seeing fragments of other people’s lives that become normal when your own life has stopped resembling anything you once expected. She tells those memories almost flatly, not because they were unimportant, but because there may be no dramatic version left to tell.

About two years later, the same broader period of instability produced one of Taylor’s favorite memories. She and her partner bought a camper, spent months working on it, and eventually stayed near Gordon Gulch in the Colorado mountains. From the right spot, Taylor says, you could open the door and see Denver stretched below. There was no water where they camped, so they hauled it in themselves and returned to town about once a week for supplies. Taylor loved it. She read one of her favorite books at the campsite and wrote poetry in the mountains. “It was one of my favorite moments I’ve ever had,” she says.

That contradiction matters when Taylor looks back on the person she was then. The moments she can still remember enjoying, the mountains, the book, the poetry, felt completely authentic. “That was me. Fully,” she says. The rest of the relationship is harder for her to claim. “I checked out a lot during that relationship,” she says. “I don’t think that was fully me a lot of the time. I think it was just me kind of going along.” Taylor wanted to stop moving. Her partner did not. “I wanted to settle down a lot. She didn’t want to, so my opinion didn’t matter.” It eventually taught Taylor something about love that sounds almost aggressively unromantic: the next person needed to value stability. That was non-negotiable. “I’ve got to have someone who has stability as a priority.”

The eight-year relationship eventually became a marriage and, according to Taylor, an abusive one. Over time she became increasingly isolated from family and friends. “When I was with my ex-wife, I more or less wasn’t really allowed contact with my family,” she says. For six or seven years she barely spoke with them. Friendships disappeared too, sometimes because maintaining them created conflict at home. Taylor began playing video games while her partner was gone and quietly developed friendships online. One of those friends, a man she calls True, eventually became the person who told her what she needed to hear.

Taylor had started talking about leaving but kept finding reasons to postpone it. Christmas was approaching. The timing was terrible. Surely there would be a better moment. True told her there would never be one. Somebody’s birthday would always be coming. Christmas would always be coming. Some special occasion would always make tomorrow seem easier than today. “When you get the opportunity to go, go,” Taylor remembers him telling her. So she left shortly before Christmas. “I had to,” she says. “Otherwise I wasn’t gonna make it out. I was gonna just probably end my life.” She walked away from a life in which, as she describes it, almost nothing felt like it belonged to her. “I didn’t have anything. Everything was hers.”

That experience is why Taylor’s advice to somebody still inside an abusive relationship sounds less like inspirational language and more like practical instruction. “I know you feel stuck, but you’re not stuck,” she says. Use the people around you. Family if you have it. Friends. People online. Somebody you met while playing a game. “Having a support group, whether it’s your family or friends online, is the best possible thing.” The point is not that somebody else rescues you. It is that they help you remember there is a life outside the one you have been told is inescapable.

Coming home was easier than Taylor expected. Her parents welcomed her quickly. “They kind of took me with open arms,” she says. Her friends required more work. Some had not heard from her in years and had good reason to be angry. She had disappeared without giving them an explanation. When she came back, some of them were blunt. “They were like, ‘What the fuck is she doing back?’” Taylor remembers. Then she explained. She apologized. They listened. “They all heard me out and accepted my apology,” she says. “It was wonderful.” The experience forced her to recognize something she had not understood while she was isolated. “I’ve really always had” a support system, she says. “I just never utilized it.”

Music began returning around the same time Taylor did. As a teenager she had experimented with early beat-making apps during the explosion of dubstep, when Skrillex was suddenly everywhere and building electronic tracks on a phone felt like a new toy nobody quite knew what to do with yet. She never seriously released any of it. Years later, after the divorce, Taylor went through old Samsung phones and discovered beats still sitting inside apps that no longer existed in current app stores. She began moving those pieces into new software and quietly making music again.

At first, Taylor tested the material on friends without telling them it was hers. She simply played the tracks and waited. They liked them. Eventually she told her friends Justin and Kyle what she had been doing. “I’m making music,” she remembers telling them. “And I think it’s good.” Their reaction was the first outside confirmation that she might not be imagining it. Her girlfriend pushed harder, encouraging Taylor to treat the music seriously, use TikTok more intentionally, and let listeners see the person behind the tracks. Taylor is careful not to say her girlfriend simply gave her confidence. “She helped me boost my confidence,” she says. The result, particularly through TikTok lives and direct interaction with listeners, was “exponential.”

What Taylor was building finally had a name, an audience, and a sound. “Dark pop, dark vaporwave, chill,” she says. “I want to drive at two a.m. in the rain type of thing.” The actual construction remains wonderfully homemade. A song might begin with Taylor humming a sound into her phone. Vocals are often recorded in the car or, preferably, a stairwell because she likes the natural reverb. From there she works with a growing collection of digital tools, including Splice, Moises, and vocal-processing apps. She talks about those tools as components and arrangement aids rather than a button that spits out a finished BombÖ song. What interests Taylor is the ability to separate, reshape, pitch, layer, and manipulate pieces until the result matches the sound in her head.

The hardest part is knowing when to stop. Taylor jokes that, given the opportunity, she might happily insert a seven-minute instrumental breakdown into the middle of a song because she got carried away. The real problem is deciding how much space should belong to the beat and how much should belong to words. She has also started developing little production habits that feel like BombÖ signatures. Sonar pings show up repeatedly because they catch her ear and, she believes, the listener’s too. The choices can sound small until Taylor explains that every ten-second section may represent a specific emotion.

All of that comes together on Under, the EP whose title Taylor describes in the most literal way possible. It means being underwater. Drowning. Dipping beneath the surface and trying to get back above it. The cover shows Taylor half submerged with a reflection beneath her. The reflection was originally supposed to be perfect, but the final image did not cooperate. She kept it because the mistake felt more accurate. “I’m actually glad it didn’t end up being a perfect reflection,” she says. “That’s the two sides.” The image became a visual version of the record: Taylor above the surface, another Taylor underneath it, neither quite separated from the other.

“Roll the Dice” opens with a line that could function as a thesis for BombÖ itself: “If you know me, you don’t know me. I think my mask is pretty cute.” Asked who is hiding behind the mask, Taylor answers Taylor. The song also contains the line about the jammed gun, reaching more than a decade backward into her suicide attempt, while other parts of the track remain firmly in the present. Taylor says her mental health is not an old story she simply revisits for material. Some days are good. Some are not. The record reflects both.

“Stormy Nights” approaches vulnerability differently. The storm references are literal, but the song’s emotional center is broader than one relationship. Taylor says the person being reached toward in the lyric about asking for help is not one specific individual. It is almost everybody. Asking for help can make her feel like a burden precisely because everybody around her is carrying something too. That is one of the quieter patterns running through Under: the fear that needing somebody will become one more weight placed on them.

Then “She Get Me Excited” blows a hole through all that heaviness. It is playful, sexual, and rooted in Taylor’s relationship with her girlfriend. She laughs when discussing it. “It’s fun. I get a kick out of it.” Writing about her girlfriend, particularly in explicitly lesbian language, gives BombÖ another purpose beyond documenting pain. Taylor wants queer women to be allowed the same messy, sexual, funny, direct pop songs heterosexual artists have been writing forever.

That becomes clearer when she talks about refusing to make her lyrics artificially universal. “I say strap in a lot of my songs,” she says matter-of-factly. She cannot remember hearing many lesbian artists use language that explicit in the kind of music she makes. Maybe some are afraid to. Maybe they have been conditioned to make queer songs easier for straight listeners to translate. Taylor has little interest in doing that. “This is our lives,” she says. “We are normal people having normal sex lives as well and love lives, and it should all be pushed as much as other music.” Then she points at the obvious double standard: heterosexual songs can be as blunt as they want and nobody asks whether the language is too specific.

“Ruminate” may be the clearest example of Taylor treating production itself as storytelling. The song circles thoughts repeatedly, not merely describing rumination but trying to recreate its physical sensation. Lines repeat until a late musical break finally interrupts the cycle. When the structure is described back to her, Taylor sounds almost relieved that somebody heard what she intended. “I’m so glad you caught all of that,” she says. “There’s a lot that goes into why they’re made the way they are. The over and over and over, the repeating.” She had even imagined part of the release moving around the listener’s head in 8D audio because the song was supposed to feel trapped inside a skull.

The closing line, “I’ll see you in another life when maybe I have the time,” is easy to mistake for a lyric directed at an ex. Taylor says it is actually meant for the people she loves. She still deals occasionally with suicidal ideation and goes to therapy, and for years she has carried an unsettling feeling that she might not live a long life. The lyric imagines having more time somewhere else with her girlfriend and the people closest to her. She explains it without melodrama, which somehow makes it land harder.

“Pray For” reaches all the way back to addiction. Taylor had begun the song earlier but returned to it during another difficult mental-health period. “The blue’s gonna land” refers directly to blue OxyContin. The song’s Candyland imagery sounds playful until Taylor explains that Candyland represents the brain remembering addiction as if it were comfort. She says she has been clean for eight years, and the next lyric draws the boundary: “It’s not an option, I just thought it.” The thought exists. Going back does not.

The song also carries something relatively new for Taylor. Prayer. She says she considered herself an atheist for most of her life but has spent roughly the last year and a half exploring spirituality because she feels as if something is missing. She deliberately wanted the end of “Pray For” to carry an almost gospel quality. Like most of Under, the song does not solve the thing it is describing. It simply refuses to pretend the thing is not there.

There is a second purpose running alongside the darker material. Taylor wants listeners who are queer, isolated, or still trying to understand themselves to hear something recognizably theirs. “There’s not a lot of representation, at least for lesbians, in our kind of music,” she says. She is particularly interested in the fun side of that representation, the part where queer women are not required to spend every song explaining pain or identity. At the same time, she hopes somebody struggling with mental health or coming out can find some peace in the heavier songs. She knows what it feels like to hear a song and suddenly cry because somebody else found the words first.

Her advice to a queer kid growing up somewhere like Kirby starts with geography. Leave for a while. Not forever, necessarily, but long enough to see that the expectations inside one small town are not the limits of the world. “Leave your little bubble and go see other places, really connect with other people,” Taylor says. She remembers how difficult it was to imagine a creative future in a place where nobody around her was suggesting that future was possible. “If I’d said in my hometown that I wanted to do the music I’m doing now, everybody would’ve said, why? You’re from a small town, that’s not gonna be a thing.”

Taylor is also worried about the broader political climate for LGBTQ people. Her hope, she says, is partly with the generation coming up behind her and with a few women in Arkansas politics she has begun watching, people she describes as up-and-coming and left-leaning. “Our whole community has been very, very scared for our rights the last few years,” she says. Her politics are not the center of BombÖ, but the fear behind them is part of the same question running through the songs: how much room are people allowed to have to become themselves?

The weather remains the thread tying almost everything together. Taylor has watched Twister enough times to jump immediately into the movie’s “finger of God” scene. Her favorite tattoo is the El Reno tornado from May 31, 2013, the beginning of what she hopes will become a full weather sleeve. Her body reads like a scattered autobiography: the Halestorm logo that started it all, Eleven from Stranger Things, an Evanescence lyric, the Water Tribe emblem from Avatar, an X-wing, Umbreon from Pokémon, the tornado, and Taylor Momsen’s autograph, which Taylor says she got at a small Little Rock venue and took to a tattoo shop.

The meteorology dream that once pushed Taylor toward the National Guard never completely died. It simply changed shape. When she was younger, a life in weather seemed to point toward a handful of traditional destinations. Now she sees an expanding world of online forecasters, independent meteorologists, livestreams, and digital weather communities. She would still like formal education in the field and still talks about weather with the energy of somebody who never really gave up on the idea. Music did not replace meteorology. Somehow, BombÖ became the place where they could live together.

Taylor also chases storms, which means the romantic language occasionally gives way to the reality of being somewhere you should not be. Near Arkadelphia, she once chased a tornado-warned storm into an area where the radar was not updating properly. The rear-flank downdraft blew her car off the road. Then softball-size hail hammered the vehicle and busted the windshield while Taylor covered herself with a jacket. “When it blew me off the road, I thought, this is it for sure,” she says. She believed she had driven directly into a tornado. She had instead caught the back end of the storm, close enough to remember the sound and the fear permanently.

It is tempting to turn the storms into an easy metaphor for everything Taylor has survived, but she does not really need the metaphor. She genuinely loves storms. When she writes about one, she says, she is often talking about an actual storm. They mean something to her that exists independently of abuse, addiction, or mental health. She loves their unpredictability, the fact that no two ever look exactly the same, and the impossible amount of energy sitting above everyone’s heads. She even wants to work the old robotic NOAA Weather Radio voice, the one weather obsessives nicknamed Tom, into a future track. “I want to use his voice in one of my songs,” she says. “He’s so sick.”

For someone who spent so much of her life trying to get away, Taylor’s current definition of success is strikingly stationary. Ask for the moment when she will know she made it and she does not start with an arena, a chart position, or a streaming plaque. She imagines playing a show, hearing people singing, and then going home. The house is small and paid off. The land is hers. Her girlfriend has a horse barn. There is a farm. Her mother lives next door in another paid-off house. Nobody owes anybody anything. “That will be my I-made-it moment,” she says.

Five years from now, the picture becomes even quieter. Taylor is sitting beneath a tin roof on the front porch. Her girlfriend is beside her. They are looking out at the horse. Maybe they are reading. Nothing particularly dramatic is happening. “Perfect,” Taylor says. For somebody whose twenties were defined by motion, success has become the ability to stop. And when she talks about what she wants from music beyond any numbers, the answer is just as simple: “Just to be able to create art. Creating art and leaving something behind that’s gonna be there forever.”

The numbers are beginning to move anyway. At the time of the interviews, Taylor’s monthly listener count had climbed past 2,000, and the map inside her streaming analytics was showing listeners in places including Australia, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Canada. She checks it often. “I have this picture in my head of these cute little in-love lesbian couples listening to it, dancing to it together, sending it to their girlfriends,” she says. “I love that so much.” The reach still feels slightly unreal to somebody making music in a game room about an hour outside Little Rock.

There is an audience much closer to home that, at the time of the interviews, had barely heard any of it. Taylor’s friends know the music. Her stepbrother had encountered some through Snapchat. Her mother and father knew she was making music but had not really heard it. Taylor can release some of her most private thoughts to strangers across the world and still hesitate over pressing play for the people who raised her. She laughs about that contradiction too. Maybe eventually. Maybe a safe snippet first.

When Taylor began receiving offers from music agencies and people promising to help, she says the flood was difficult to evaluate. She did what someone who has already learned the cost of trusting the wrong situation tends to do: she checked. She looked through Rainbows In Revolt’s site, studied the artists and people connected to it, and looked for names she recognized. The effort mattered. “Really seeing the effort you wanted to put behind it, that was very convincing,” she says of deciding to join. Then the dry timing returns. “You got past my ADHD, so good job.”

For the people already listening to Under, Taylor has one last thing to say, and it may be the clearest statement of what the record is actually for. “The fact that y’all even give the music I make in my little game room the time of day is absolutely a blessing,” she says. Then she catches herself. She is grateful people connect with these songs, but connection means they may know some version of the feelings inside them. “Honestly, I’d almost rather you not resonate with it, because I don’t want you to feel the way I felt. But if you do, I hope it brings you some mental peace.”

Near the end of the conversation, the image Taylor chose for Under comes back into focus. She has spent hours describing years of dipping below the surface: addiction, homelessness, isolation, suicidal thoughts, the relationship she escaped, and the life she has slowly assembled afterward. So there is really only one question left. Is she staying above water now?

The storm outside eventually moves on. Taylor is still about an hour outside Little Rock, still obsessed with weather, still building songs out of pieces recorded in cars, stairwells, phones, and a game room, still figuring out exactly how large BombÖ can become without losing the person underneath it. She grew up aching to leave a town that seemed too small for the life she imagined, then spent years moving so constantly that home itself became the thing she wanted most. Now she is making music that can travel for her.

Bombogenesis is a word for rapid intensification. Taylor chose it because it sounded like weather. It ended up fitting the artist too. Not because every piece of her past needs to become a storm metaphor, and not because survival turns pain into something beautiful by default. It fits because BombÖ is what happens when Taylor takes pressure, noise, desire, fear, memory, and the strange weather systems inside her own head and gives them somewhere to go. One track at a time, she is still intensifying.