Abby Nissenbaum studied violence. Now she writes songs about it

Most artists describe their influences in terms of other artists. Abby Nissenbaum describes hers in terms of data. Before becoming the Nashville-based indie singer-songwriter working with producers like Riley Geare and Matt Qualls and earning features in GLAAD and Atwood Magazine, she was a graduate student at the University of Memphis, deep in the clinical literature on sexual and gender-based violence.

Abby Nissenbaum photographed by Emily Tauraso

She studied the mechanisms of harm, the silence surrounding it, and the systems that allow it to persist. She was on a path toward a doctorate in social psychology. Then she picked up a mic instead—though, in truth, she had been holding one long before graduate school found her.

Abby’s childhood onstage 

Nissenbaum`s relationship with performance began at age six, when she started participating in local and regional musical theater in Connecticut. She trained as a classically trained soprano, taking vocal and acting lessons well into her early college years. 

For a teenager navigating bullying and an emerging sense of her own sexuality, theater offered a refuge. It was, she has said, "a place where I could go to be accepted and loved for exactly who I was".

That refuge did not survive her transition into adulthood. Discouraged by the competitiveness of professional theater and unsure whether she wanted to pursue performance as a career, Nissenbaum set music aside and turned to academia, eventually landing in a social psychology graduate program focused on violence-prevention research. 

However, Nissenbaum kept her first love. For years, she existed in both worlds simultaneously: logging research hours by day, writing songs at night, slowly building a catalog that processed the same ideas and core values her academic work was dissecting.

Abby Nissenbaum photographed by Emily Tauraso

Her return to music was not dramatic. It happened gradually, sparked by a chance connection with producer Riley Geare, who encouraged her to bring her songs into a real studio for the first time. Choosing to pivot into a different medium, the artist found that music could do something a journal article could not: it could make a stranger feel less alone in an experience they had never seen named out loud.

Writing what the data cannot say

Nissenbaum`s career change became the heart of her artistry. Her debut EP, Unreliable Narrator (2023), explored themes of depression, heartbreak, and self-destructive thought patterns, framing them around the psychological concept of maladaptive cognition—the inner voice that insists the worst things someone believes about themselves must be true. 

She has described the project as a message aimed especially at LGBTQ+ listeners: a reminder that "not all the terrible things we think or hear about ourselves are actually true".

Her 2024 EP, Don`t Want to Cry, produced with Steph Trivison, also explores themes of strength and freedom. She describes this project as being about "losing power and slowly, but surely, gaining it back," with tracks that shift between quieter, more melancholic moments and brighter, more positive ones. 

In a feature with C-Heads Magazine, Nissenbaum shares her vision for this EP. She mentions, “I hope this EP feels like chatting with a protective and uplifting friend, reminding you that you have so much personal power even when you don’t feel like you do.”

Her subsequent work has become more specific. Several of her songs address lesbian intimate partner violence — a subject that Nissenbaum has noted is almost absent from mainstream music and media, despite being a documented and underreported reality within queer communities. 

“Many of my songs touch on lesbian intimate partner violence, and that`s not a topic we hear about often,” Nissembaum mentions. “It`s been rewarding to have people message me and say they`ve had a similar experience, and how they feel their experiences are valid through my music”.

Nissenbaum hopes her music will serve as a direct form of communication and an empowering anthem for LGBTQ+ listeners and victims of oppression. With her songs, she wants to bring not just an outsider`s perspective but also the precision of someone who has spent years conducting research and being grounded in the value of lived experience.

The artist that never left

Nissenbaum’s departure from academia was not a departure from the work. She has partnered with the Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence and the Tennessee Coalition to End Domestic and Sexual Violence, translating her research background into concrete community advocacy: benefit shows and public conversations about the conditions that make music spaces unsafe for women and queer artists.

Continuing to pursue her love of music, Nissenbaum released her new EP, Want to Be Wrong, last June in time for Pride Month, featuring five songs about longing, romantic fatalism, and the emotional cost of isolation. 

In a feature in Elle Canada, Nissenbaum described Want to Be Wrong as an EP built around "self-fulfilling prophecies and an intentionally overdramatic sense of romantic fatalism" —songs less interested in cataloging a single heartbreak than in interrogating why closeness feels so elusive in a hyperconnected world.

Whether through her music or her advocacy, Nissenbaum wants her growing audience to feel a little less alone in their experiences and to believe they have far more personal power, even when they don`t feel they do.

Abby Nissenbaum did not leave research behind. Now working in her full-time day job in health tech alongside her music career, she just found a louder room to do it in.

By: Georgette Virgo