Chelsea Lankes

It’s late, and I’m in that mood. You know the one.

You’re sitting alone in your room, in the dark. Maybe you’re thinking about a lady (or a gent) or perhaps you’re reconsidering that liberal arts degree you’re working towards. Regardless of what has got you down, all you want right now is something smooth and contemplative. You’ve already listened to as much Ben Gibbard as you can stand so instead, you look for something new. Here it is.

Meet Chelsea Lankes. She’s a sweetie from Nashville with a voice to match. She takes Nashville pop and adds a light honey glaze to it that lingers on your audible tastebuds until you take another bite. Her new EP is called Ringing Bell and it’s streamable here and buyable here. Allow her the chance to resonate in your bedroom tonight. I’ll even make it easy for you to due so.

Here’s a new duet from the record called “Something Right” that features the undeniably infectious voice of Parachute‘s Will Anderson. Enjoy and don’t be too sad tonight. - Under the Gun Review

In a city where it’s commonly joked that every food service employee is also an aspiring musician and you can’t throw a rock without hitting a songwriter in the head, it can be difficult for a singer-songwriter to make a splash. That’s partially why up-and-coming Nashville pop artist Chelsea Lankes decided to trade in her guitar for a synthesizer. She moved from Texas to Music City with a singer-songwriter foundation, but observing the town’s over-saturation of similar artists and experiencing her own creative stagnation made Lankes reconsider her game plan.

“You have to make waves in a different way with that kind of genre and ... it wasn't really working for me,” Lankes says candidly, “so I decided to scratch everything…and re-launch myself.”

Also factoring into her decision were the shows she observed where the “artists have beautiful songs but the show in and of itself can be boring.” These shows made her experience a revelation about her own music: “As I was playing the songs that I was writing out, I realized, ‘I'm boring! I'm not inspiring anyone.’ It [was] more like my therapy, whereas I wanted…to create a project and a show that people can go to and…dance and…get energized and walk away feeling like they had an experience.”

So together with producer Seth Jones, she created her EP Ringing Bell, an electronic mosaic of dream pop, disco and ambient that includes a digitalized re-imagining of Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Lankes’ voice is clean and crisp, giving a starry quality to “Yellow” and a delightfully chilling effect to “Wrecking Ball,” a groove-inducing pop song in which she reminds a past significant other that “You were the smoking gun / You tied the noose”—dark accusations that make the song edgier than your average bad-relationship lament.

The inspiration for Ringing Bell stems partially from personal places— “Wrecking Ball” is what Lankes calls her “girl-power, punch-you-in-the-face breakup song.” But the lyrics largely sprang from the music she and Jones created. “I think that's what’s unique about that [writing Ringing Bell] process,” says Lankes, whose past projects usually involved writing the lyrics and melody simultaneously. “I [got] to listen to music and create a story from there. And really, make it whatever I wanted it to be.”

For Lankes, Ringing Bell is more than just an exciting new EP. It represents how she found her identity as an artist, evolving from music that was a form of “therapy” to something that she says is “a branch of me rather than just a number of songs about how I felt at the moment.” She says that after awhile “nothing I wrote” in the singer-songwriter genre “felt truly authentic or exciting”; whereas dream pop has been a different experience altogether. Lankes had developed a love for artists like Robyn, Ellie Goulding, and Frank Ocean and The Weeknd by the time she and Jones began recording, and though she initially doubted her ability to express herself in a similar style because of its foreignness, when “we got into the studio we started writing and I was like, ‘I can do this! This is what I love’ and it just made me feel alive. So I went with it.”

While being a dream pop artist in a folk, rock and country town has made her stand out from the Nashville crowd, one minor problem she’s encountered is that local industry executives aren’t quite sure what to do with her. “They just don't know where to place me; they don't know where to go. So in a way, that's a bad thing. But in another way, it's also good because it's...getting me outside of Nashville, which is awesome.”

Talk of connecting Lankes with industries in New York and L.A. has been floating about. But she seems more than capable of establishing herself as an artist, with or without formal help from the music industry. In the future, she hopes “to do some acoustic videos for YouTube, so you can kind of see that the songs still have that melodic and lyrical integrity and I can sing without all of the production aspects. I feel like people need to see that sometimes to really get into an artist.” With that sort of insight, there’s no doubt that Chelsea Lankes will soon be a mover and shaker in Nashville, and beyond. - Brite Revolution

Chelsea Lankes, a 25-year-old Texas native who made the move to Nashville a few years ago, started performing at the age of 5 (courtesy of a Barbie karaoke machine—jealous!) and has been unstoppable ever since. In direct contrast to her many country and western peers in Music City, Chelsea writes/sings/performs a category-bending blend of folk-y electronic dance pop.

"Just being a singer in Nashville is hard because everyone does music here, and so many people do it really well. But then the fact that I do this alternative kind of pop music, dreampop... It's like I'm the lone unicorn roaming around this town. A white stag, if you will. I literally don't know who to play shows with here," she says of her un-Nashvillian sound. "I want to not be bound by the stereotypes and the apathy that comes from being just another artist here, so I'm taking some risks, and just making music that is relevant and fresh. Hopefully it will make its way out of this state's lines and connect with people across the country and around the world."

Chelsea claims a myriad of musical inspirations, from Robyn and Frank Ocean to John Mayer and Muse, has a girl-crush on Katy Perry, and is a self-proclaimed Coldplay superfan—there’s even a hypnotic cover of their hit tune, “Yellow,” on the album. Other than that track, Ringing Bell came together somewhat piecemeal over several months.

“This whole process has been about second tries for me. I went into the project with five songs ready, and it just wasn't working. So we scrapped four of them, and [producer] Seth Jones and I just wrote and recorded as we went, taking chances and doing exactly what we wanted. It paid off, because we ended up with a product that's not contrived in the least.” The album takes its name from a lyric on the record, meant to evoke musical and thematic resonance—“an echo through the noise,” which is what Chelsea hopes the album will be in a heavily music-saturated culture.

A combination of inspired rhythms, catchy refrains, and danceable backbeats with her clear, sweet voice makes for addictive listening with a slightly '90s-throwback feel. In addition to the aforementioned cover, the album also includes a soaring, elegant duet with Parachute’s Will Anderson. Check out the first track off the new EP, called "Wrecking Ball," below—a heartfelt screw-you anthem about a game-playing boy (natch). "A good song is the ultimate last word. Like, GAME OVER," says Chelsea. - Glamour Magazine

If you haven’t heard the name Chelsea Lankes already, you’ll soon be adding it to your iTunes library. Having just celebrated the release of her first EP, To Begin With, Everything, Chelsea is on her way to become Nashville’s latest pop-prodigy.

Now calling Nashville home, the relocated Texas sweetheart has been performing for friends and family since the early 1990s. However, it was not until recently this twenty-something began to share her talent with the rest of us. Influenced by “love, life, faith, and everything in-between,” Chelsea melodically blends sugar sweet pop with a dash of country western spice.

“Moonlight Romance,” the fourth track on her debut EP, exudes this. With the sweet sounding strings of her acoustic guitar and the unexpected flair of the synth, Chelsea’s carefree spirit culminates in the song’s catchy chorus. “Can’t Stop,” another fantastic tune off To Begin With, Everything, radiates Colbie Caillat’s beachy effervescence and unbuttoned disposition, all the while staying true to Chelsea’s unique romantic vocalizations and musical arrangements. We imagine this track perfectly complementing a breezy, outdoor spring or summer wedding. “Let Love Be,” a flawless accompaniment to an equally flawless bride’s grand entrance, gradually builds from an airy ballad into an rich, atmospheric declaration of love.

The Music Bed is thrilled to be partnering with such a talented and unique young artist. Once you have your own listen to Chelsea’s heartfelt pop ballads, you’ll find it hard to not want to make them apart of you or your client’s special day. Whether online or on-the-road, make sure to check out more from Chelsea Lankes.
- The Music Bed