Five years after going viral on TikTok, Stella Cole (Communication ’21) is still adjusting to fame.

The singer began posting videos of herself singing melodies from the Great American Songbook — a collection of 20th-century American jazz staples — while at home in Springfield, Illinois, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, she’s gained over 800,000 followers on TikTok and has performed at venues such as Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hall. She released her eponymous debut album of Great American Songbook covers last August.

Cole returned to Illinois for a concert at Park West in Chicago on April 30 as part of her recent U.S. tour, performing covers of classics including “It Had To Be You” from “When Harry Met Sally” and “Moon River” from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Between sets, she spoke to the audience about memories of Illinois, the difficulty of self-promotion and the childhood nostalgia of the songs she sang.

“Sentimentality is kind of my thing, if you hadn’t noticed,” Cole said to the crowd.

Hitting a growth note

Cole’s love for songs and films dating back to the 1930s ignited at age two, when her parents introduced her to “The Wizard of Oz” on VHS.

“I was sort of hooked immediately and asked to watch it every single day for over a year,” Cole said.

The movie even inspired her second birthday party theme. This passion led her parents to show her more films from the era, including “Meet Me in St. Louis” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” Her mother, Amy Ballinger-Cole, also said Cole knew every line in “Mary Poppins.”

Ballinger-Cole said that memorizing lines wasn’t enough for her daughter. She said when Cole was four years old, she mimicked Snow White’s deep sleep by lying on a blanket at home.

“She always was performing, quoting the lines from the musicals — obsessed,” Ballinger-Cole said. “Those were her toys.”

Naturally, Cole’s love for musicals and Broadway led to another obsession — New York City. A poster of the city hung in her bedroom throughout her childhood.

Her first audition for a musical in second grade, though, didn’t go as planned. Cole’s father, Benjamin Cole, said his daughter didn’t get the part she wanted.

The pattern continued. Benjamin Cole said there were “disappointments once a month.” Yet, Stella Cole persisted, securing her first leading role in eighth grade.

“There was always a challenge,” Benjamin Cole said. “She had to work for it.”

These casting struggles weren’t limited to Stella Cole’s childhood years.

Throughout her time at Northwestern, she performed in student-produced plays. But she said she didn’t get parts in the musicals she auditioned for.

“I wasn’t super confident in my singing at that time,” she said. “A lot of what’s being done on Broadway is very pop-focused and really belting high — just styles of singing that don’t come naturally to me.”

Finding her forte

Cole never planned to seek out an acting or music career. At some moments, she considered pursuing law school or even medical school like some of her NU peers.

Ballinger-Cole said she had to talk her daughter out of becoming a lawyer.

“I was like, ‘Have you ever been interested in the law?’” Ballinger-Cole said. “What exactly is your dream there? What are you looking to do? You might as well keep going with this and see what happens.”

During her sophomore year, Cole took a class about the Great American Songbook with former musical theatre Prof. Stephen Schellhardt. She said the course affirmed the type of music that best suited her voice.

Although she still felt insecure about her singing, she said the songs’ familiarity gave her courage. For one assignment, she sang Barbra Streisand’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” in front of her classmates.

“Singing that song in that class was a really big moment,” Cole said. “I felt like I was able to own it, and own that I was doing a good job for the first time, maybe ever, as a singer.”

A social media sensation

Cole moved back to Springfield her junior year due to the pandemic. Suddenly, instead of the packed schedules she’d grown accustomed to at NU, her days were mostly empty.

While walking their dog together, her father suggested to Cole that she post videos online of her singing, especially since he knew that she had a knack for imitating artists’ voices.

Cole said the idea embarrassed her at first. Throughout her childhood, she said she’d felt insecure singing on camera. When her parents tried to film her during one of her impromptu performances, she would stop.

TikTok, though, seemed less daunting since none of her friends had begun using the app yet, she said.

One of her earliest videos shows her in a blue bathrobe, cleansing her face as she sings “Over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz.” In overlaying text, she writes that the multitasking was designed to “get myself to sing in front of a camera more.”

Her first TikTok that reached 100,000 views was a tape of Stephen Sondheim’s “Everybody Says Don’t” from an assignment in former musical theatre Prof. John Haas’s Sondheim class.

Haas also served as Cole’s academic adviser while she attended NU. He said she always had natural musicianship. Those instincts, coupled with the smoothness of her voice, made her singing accessible to a wide fanbase, Haas said.

“It’s not a cookie-cutter voice in any way, shape or form,” he said. “She has her own style.”

But Cole’s online popularity didn’t skyrocket overnight. Her viewership increased as she posted more videos.

True to her inner “Wizard of Oz” fan, she sang several Judy Garland classics, including “The Trolley Song” from “Meet Me in St. Louis.” Commenters even compared her voice to Garland’s, which Cole attributed to the fact that she’d listened to Garland for “thousands of hours.”

She said such positive feedback helped her develop confidence in her voice.

“I wasted a lot of time, I think, on doing things that other people told me would be successful or trying to follow paths that other people said were right for me,” Cole said. “Those weren’t successful because they weren’t right for me.”

Where jazz never sleeps

After graduating in 2021, Cole did what she’d dreamt of doing since childhood. She moved to New York City.

Once she arrived in the Big Apple, she began emailing people for gigs. She sang everywhere — restaurants, bars, coffee shops and even hotel lobbies.

“They didn’t even have singers there, but they just had a piano,” she said. “I would go and be like, ‘Hey, are you sure you don’t want to hire me?’”

Cole said her social media following helped. Renowned musicians, such as singer and guitarist James Taylor, shared her content. When she found out Michael Bublé had reposted an Instagram reel of her singing “Smile,” she said she “screamed on a public bus.”

During the pandemic, Cole would go live on TikTok and answer questions. People asked her about her dream gigs, to which she said she wanted to play at the Birdland Jazz Club in New York City or a jazz venue in Paris.

Four years later, those aspirations have turned into reality.

Cole concluded her residency at Birdland, which has seen performers like Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, earlier this year. She’s also performed in several Parisian jazz clubs and will return to the city in October to play La Cigale, a thousand-seat theater.

One of the most surreal moments, Cole said, was recording her Christmas album with a live orchestra at the Power Station recording studio in New York City.

Another was seeing her face on a Times Square billboard after Amazon Music selected her as one of its 2025 Artists to Watch, she said.

“When I was in college, it was not something I could have ever envisioned,” Cole said. “I never thought I would record an album as a solo artist or be signed to a record label or anything like that.”

Staying cool amid the fame

With her second album in the works, Cole said she’s grown more accustomed to self-promotion, but she sometimes still has difficulty hitting the “post” button on social media.

“I definitely started out very shy, and still, sometimes I feel very shy internally,” Cole said. “But I went to acting school. You just pretend to be confident. People believe you are, and eventually, half the time, you believe it too.”

Communication Prof. Cindy Gold taught Cole acting at NU. She said Cole never drew attention to herself as a student.

Still, others noticed her. While watching Cole perform in a student production, a fellow faculty member asked Gold, ‘Who is that?’

“She was sort of being discovered in a very organic way,” Gold said. “She didn’t come into the room and say, ‘Hi, I’m me. Love me. Realize how talented I am.’ It was a slow and organic kind of process.”

During her Chicago performance, Cole told the crowd her least favorite part of the night was announcing that attendees could buy her album outside.

She also joked about thinking her face looked too tall on a Times Square billboard.

“I’m stumbling on my words because I’m saying something good that happened to me,” Cole said during the concert.

But her comments don’t prevent her from connecting with fans. When she said she had only two more songs left to sing for the night, one audience member’s “No!” sounded throughout the venue.

It was Keller Weiss, who attended the show with her husband. They’d followed Cole’s career since discovering her on TikTok.

“I feel like I’ve known her forever,” Weiss said. “This is the first time I’ve seen her.”

Marching to her own beat

Cole said that in college, she thought the music she enjoyed was a niche hobby. Yet, it’s made a comeback in recent years with Grammy-award winners like Samara Joy and Laufey finding commercial success.

As for songs from the 1930s and 1940s, Cole said they emerged during tumultuous times in the U.S. and offered comfort, which people also need now.

“The authenticity that this kind of music can bring, of getting a real group of musicians together in a studio — I think that kind of energy is something that’s kind of missing from the music industry right now,” Cole said.

The songs on Cole’s debut album were written long before she was born, yet she said many of them could describe her own life. “Detour Ahead,” a 1940s jazz classic, captures the feeling of being unsure about one’s future.

Cole said she definitely felt that way during college. Even now, she said it’s difficult to feel certain of oneself in the music industry, given art’s subjectivity.

But she’s grown sure of one thing. Those missed roles at NU weren’t the end of the world after all, she said.

“Other people will never understand your artistry more than you,” Cole said. “You are always the person who knows most.”

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