In her buoyant pop track “Dance You Outta My Head,” the musician Cat Janice sings about “dancing on the edge of disaster.” As her own health outlook darkened amid a grim fight with cancer, the song caught fire online, with thousands of supporters heeding her call to sway, and even groove, in the face of tragedy.
Born Catherine Janice Ipsan, the singer and multi-instrumentalist started writing music as a teenager and released it throughout her 20s. But “Dance You Outta My Head,” which she shared on social media alongside candid discussion of her grueling cancer treatments, quickly became the biggest hit of her career.
Ms. Ipsan released the song on Jan. 19, a few days after entering hospice care. TikTok users — including celebrities like Jason Derulo — began to leave messages of support. Some used the song to accompany their videos as a show of solidarity with Ms. Ipsan and her 7-year-old son, Loren, to whom she said she had transferred the song’s rights, positioning the song as a gift to her son in perpetuity.
“I changed all the rights from my songs so every presave and every stream goes to Loren,” Ms. Ipsan wrote on Instagram last month. The song has been used in more than two million TikTok videos and became the singer’s first song to enter the Billboard charts.
“I’m praying my story isn’t over yet,” she wrote in a post on her birthday, the day after the song’s release. “But if it is, this is a pretty incredible way to say goodbye.”
Ms. Ipsan died on Wednesday at her family home in Annandale, Va. She was 31.
The cause was sarcoma, according to William Ipsan, her brother.
Ms. Ipsan was one of four children in a musical family. She played violin and piano, while her brother sometimes accompanied her on drums. Their mother was a radio D.J. who instilled a love of music in her kids, Mr. Ipsan, 27, said in an interview this month: “We’d be singing every lyric to the Eagles and the Beatles and all the oldies.”
According to her brother, Ms. Ipsan was also a science nerd, who studied geology at George Mason University before going to work as a geospatial analyst. But writing songs remained her outlet, he said. “If she’s stressed or anything, she’ll go do music.”
In 2022 she was diagnosed with sarcoma, a rare form of cancer that she first noticed as a lump in her neck. She underwent surgery and more than a dozen rounds of chemotherapy, her brother said. She posted personal updates on TikTok, including videos of shaving her head and writing music while undergoing treatment. She released an album, “Modern Medicine,” in July 2023.
“Cat’s always sharing what she’s got going on,” said her husband, Kyle Higginbotham, 36, also a musician. “It just happened to be that cancer was what she had going on her last year.”
She continued to perform at venues in the Washington area during treatment, sometimes alongside Mr. Higginbotham, who recalled taking his wife to rounds of chemo, then playing a show with her the very next day. They got engaged onstage in August, at her album release show, and married in December.
The success of “Dance You Outta My Head” was gratifying but also painful, Mr. Ipsan said. “She’s happy that she’s been doing music for so long and it’s getting the appreciation she deserves,” he said. But the outpouring of supportive messages from fans did not erase her disappointment that she probably would never get to go on a headlining tour or attend the Grammy Awards.
She spent her final weeks at her family home in Annandale, baking bread and getting matching tattoos with family members. Mr. Higginbotham and Loren often sat by her side, making beats on electronic drum pads. When she was feeling strong enough, she hummed.
Her husband encouraged her fans to see Ms. Ipsan as more than a “sob story.”
“It’s not just some girl made a song because she’s dying of cancer,” he said. “Cat’s a real-deal artist and poured every minute of her life into it, right up until the end.”
