Norah's World
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
In conversation with Norah's World — caught mid-festival.
Photographed by Bridget Plate
Interviewed & written by Marcus Francois Seide
I catch Norah somewhere in the middle of chaos.
This interview was originally supposed to happen in person somewhere in Brooklyn, where both of us live, but instead I’m calling her while she’s running around Rolling Loud with maybe thirty minutes to spare before she has to disappear again.
She had just gotten flown out for the festival and was bouncing between sets, people, and whatever else comes with being at one of the biggest music festivals in the world.
Honestly, it feels like the perfect way to talk to her.
A lot has changed for Norah’s World in a short amount of time. What started as posting “if you like this music” videos online turned into a real audience of people connecting with her taste, her honesty, and the world she’s built around her music. But underneath all of it, she still sounds like the same person who used to sing anywhere and everywhere we went growing up in South Florida. Now, she gets paid to do it.
Even over the phone, while clearly multitasking through festival chaos, she sounds calm.
I ask my first question. “Have you ever written a song about me, and if not, when can we expect that?”
“Not yet...” she responds.
“Coming from a place that isn’t the immediate hub like Los Angeles or New York, you can easily get stuck in an ‘I’ll move out there when it makes sense for me’ bubble,” I tell her. “What gave you that push to move to New York before you really had an audience yet?”
“I just knew that in NYC, unlike Florida, you can do shows and perform and not be a big artist yet,” she says. “So I wanted to try that. It definitely pushed me to move here.”
That feeling of moving before waiting for permission seems to define a lot of her story so far.
A lot of people found Norah through her “if you like this music” videos online, a format plenty of people try but very few actually make feel personal.
“It actually started as an accident. I kept saying it was a different genre than what it was, and everyone started commenting to correct me!” she laughs.
Back then, though, posting herself online did not come naturally.
“I used to be a little scared of promoting my music and wanted to do the work in person,” she tells me. “But now I realize finding a community online is so fun and important because it lets you leave room in real life for real-life things.”
“This is genuinely all I’ve ever wanted to do. I think I’m really great at making music.”
For someone whose online presence feels so confident, her confidence actually comes from something pretty simple.
“This is genuinely all I’ve ever wanted to do,” she says. “I think it’s easy to pull confidence from that because this is one of the only things I’m really good at. I think I’m really great at making music.”
Music has always been around us. Our mom sang constantly growing up, mostly through our church choir, and even now, Norah talks about that influence with a lot of appreciation.
“I think it’s so cool that mom sings,” she says.
“Mom was always singing, every Sunday in our very strict Haitian Evangelical church, but your music went in such a different direction. Where do you think your sound really comes from?”
“We are Haitian American, and growing up in Florida, I definitely gravitated more toward the music from there than the music from Haiti, at least as a kid. Mom is definitely one of my influences.”
I ask her if becoming an artist herself changed the way she sees the people who inspired her growing up.
“I definitely appreciate their talent and resilience more now,” she says, talking about artists like Frank Ocean and Tyler the Creator. “A lot of people do the things they do, but don’t have the same impact. I think it’s because of the passion they put toward it, and I really appreciate that commitment to artistry.”
Even now, with artists constantly being told to reinvent themselves online, Norah seems pretty uninterested in forcing anything.
“I just try to be myself and always do the things that I think are cool,” she says. “I’m always finding something new that I think is cool, so it’s easier to reinvent myself naturally.”
Maybe that’s also why there doesn’t seem to be much separation between her real personality and the version people know online as Norah’s World.
“I think I’m literally the exact same person,” she says. “Everything I like in real life is what inspires my music and graphics.”
Before the call ends, I ask her what advice she would give someone from a suburban town trying to take music seriously.
“I’d say go for it if you really mean it from the purest place in your heart,” she says. “It will definitely work out.”
I can hear in her voice that she has to go soon, so I ask her one last thing.
If she could talk to the version of herself who had just landed in New York with our older sister, before the audience and before any of this started happening, what would she say?
“I wish I could’ve told myself to start posting immediately,” she says. “I used to be scared of promoting my music because I thought I had to prove myself in person first. But now I know building a community online is such an important part of this. It gives you room in real life to actually live your real life.”
A few seconds later, she’s gone, back into the noise of Rolling Loud and back into the world she’s been building for herself in real time.
Norah and I grew up in Palm Beach, Florida, raised by our Haitian immigrant parents, Marc and Paulette, alongside our two other siblings, one older and one younger. But truthfully, it often felt like I only had one sibling: Norah.
She sang every single day at home with a voice that was impossible to ignore, sometimes even to the point of annoyance. But that is how you know someone is a real artist. They simply cannot stop doing the thing they love most.
I cannot remember a time when I thought Norah would grow up to do anything that was not creative. She always had that spark, that energy around her. So when she and our older sister packed their bags into a car and left for a new life in New York, I was nervous for them, but deep down, I knew she would make it no matter what.
She just wrapped up 2025 with over 800 thousand listeners and 2.3 million streams across her discography, earning recognition from artists like SZA, Leon Thomas, and Tyler the Creator, just to name a few of the people who see the same light in Norah that I always have.
And I truly cannot wait to see what comes next for Norah’s World.
Stream Norah's World on Spotify and Apple Music
Follow her on Instagram
Full Team Credits:
Interviewed & Written by Marcus Francois Seide
Photographed by Bridget Plate
Styled by Elisse Hanssen
Photo Assisted by Tara Bryan
Content Creation by Mackenzie Lockett
