Katie Noonan. Photo: Cybele Malinowski.
Five-time ARIA Award winner Katie Noonan is bringing her deeply personal new album Alone but all one home to the Sunshine Coast this spring.
Fresh from taking home three awards at the 2026 Sunshine Coast Music Awards, Noonan joins YELO for a Q&A about music, creativity, community and life on the Coast.
Noonan will perform at The Majestic Theatre in Pomona on September 26 before heading to The J in Noosa on October 24.
The album emerged from Noonan’s grieving process following her divorce, with songs taking shape almost without intention. It also incorporates words from writer Trent Dalton, transforming five unpublished vignettes into part of a wider meditation on love, loss, change and healing.
She recorded the album in her lounge room in the hills behind Nambour, on Gubbi Gubbi Country, and says bringing the songs home one year later feels fitting.
YELO caught up with Noonan about making one of her most vulnerable records, reconnecting with her past through Dalton’s words, the Sunshine Coast creative community and the dog who helped get her through the hardest part.
Q&A with Katie Noonan
YELO: This is your 30th studio album and your most personal. Was there a point when you wondered whether you wanted to share this much of yourself?
Katie Noonan: Absolutely – over and over and over again. I had no intention of writing this album tbh – the songs just fell out as part of my natural grieving process as a musician. All I have ever done is let the music flow with as much honesty as possible, and as difficult as it was, it felt like the right thing to do. To just let the music flow and share my divorce experience – which is an experience 50% of us go through, so it really is a common experience and I found great solace from other women and men who have gone through this life changing grief also.
It is not only about divorce though. It is just about sitting with change and honouring it – whatever that change might be. Grief is the price of love for us all and it comes in so many different shapes and forms.
Serendipitously Trent gifted me 156 pages of exclusive unpublished text for my classical a cappella ensemble AVÉ Australian Vocal Ensemble (which has since turned into a 13 piece song cycle!), but I was inexorably drawn to 5 vignettes that were all about the birth of love, the absolute magic and wonder of new love, and his words really healed my heavy heart and were a beautiful panacea for me.
It helped me remember how much I adored the father of my children and how wonderful those early years were as young lovers taking on the world as a partnership and musical collaborators, and as young parents shepherding our two beautiful boys into this world together.
YELO: You first met Trent Dalton when he interviewed you as a young journalist more than 20 years ago. What do you remember about that first interview, and could either of you have imagined you’d one day make an album using his words?
Katie Noonan: I remember he was SO sweet and kind and warm and he was sort of my first ‘grown up’ interview with a journalist that wasn’t from a street mag/uni zine. He was a sweetheart and very proud to be from and about Brisbane – as we were as a band.
As children of a journalist, I remember my brother Tyrone encouraging him to stick to his writing and geez did he ever! It has been SO great watching his success, as he is a genuinely lovely human who deserves it all. He is also unflinchingly honest in his writing, and that is not easy to do, so I feel we kind of have that in common with our work also.
YELO: You recorded this album in your lounge room in the hills behind Nambour. What does this part of the Sunshine Coast give you creatively, and what would you love to see more of in Nambour’s music and arts scene?
Katie Noonan: I am proud to be Noons in the Nam now. I remember when I was Artistic Director of the Queensland Music Festival in 2017 and we produced the Currie Street Music Crawl … it kinda felt like Fortitude Valley in the 90’s in Brisbane.
There is an artistic vibrancy and distinct sense of history here. I feel it is an area that has not been properly prioritised from a Local Government budget POV, but I can feel the seeds of changing blossoming now with recent developments at C Square etc.
I would just love people to make sure they get out and support local artists more – go to the Ambulance Station gallery exhibitions, go to The Presynct, go to the local record store, go to the local cinema etc, because if you don’t we will lose these spaces and they are integral to our local sense of cultural identity and pride.
YELO: These songs came from such a vulnerable period in your life. Does performing them in Pomona and Noosa, so close to home, feel different from taking them elsewhere?
Katie Noonan: I guess it feels like bringing them home. And I will get to sleep in my own bed after the gig – a rare privilege for me!
These songs were all born on this beautiful Gubbi Gubbi Country in my lounge room and recorded there in Spring last year – so it feels fitting to be bringing them home in Spring one year later, and especially with the River Suite String Quartet who played on the album. They are truly magnificent world-class players who choose to make the Sunshine Coast their home – with Sarah King on violin, Dan Williams on viola, and Sarah’s big sister Louise King of Cello Dreaming on cello.
YELO: Does Sassy understand she lives with a five-time ARIA winner, or are you still just the woman who feeds her? And if she could choose your encore, which song would she demand?
Katie Noonan: HA HA! She loves all music but she would just like a treat of ANY KIND please! She was very much a part of the album and thankfully the lower frequencies of the cello and piano disguised her snoring!
She has been an integral part of my healing and grieving process, and I honestly could not have survived the last 18 months without her. I moved 5 Jan 2025 and cried for about a week packing up my life of 26 years, and then cried for about a week on my own in my new empty house, and I realised I really needed her company to get through. She has been an integral part of my healing and amazing company in the hours of darkness , and really has been the best doggie in the universe.
Thankfully with my touring I also have an amazing dog sitter – one of our students from Eumundi School of Music – who plays piano and loves Sassy, so it has been great to know she has been happy and content in her home, and that my piano has been lovingly played while I am away working also!
