Since stepping into the Country music scene in 2022, Shaylen has made an impressive impact, swiftly rising as one of the genre's standout emerging female voices. Signing a publishing deal with Sony/ATV after two years of dedicated writing and recording, Shaylen channels raw emotion straight from her journal into her lyrics. Her debut single, ‘What If I Don’t' became a viral sensation, amassing over 28 million streams on Spotify alone and signalling her arrival in Nashville.
With each new release, Shaylen has continued to make waves: PEOPLE magazine praised her single ‘Roots' while Billboard compared ‘Been There Before' to “early Taylor Swift vibes” with a “wisened confidence” all her own. She also collaborated with former Hinder frontman Austin John Winkler on a country take of his hit ‘Lips of an Angel' but it was her duet with Noah Hicks on ‘Second Time Around' that really brought her to our attention and she's gone and followed that up with the powerful ‘To Tell You the Truth,' which closes down a chapter, an era and a story that she has been telling in song form for the past couple of years.
Currently, Shaylen is working on new music for her debut project under Nashville Harbor Records & Entertainment, promising more heartfelt storytelling to come and we were thrilled to catch up with her to talk all about it.
Thank you for your time today Shaylen, we know how busy you are, so it's much appreciated.
Absolutely! Thank you for yours.
I'm really enjoying your music right now. It was ‘Second Time Around' that put you on my radar and then I did a deep dive from there. That song will definitely be in our ‘Top 10 Duets of 2024' feature in December, what a great song.
I actually got an email around this time last year from Noah's team saying ‘hey' – I am always super-down to collaborate with people. They were saying that they had a song that they thought I would be a great fit for but it wasn't ‘Second Time Around!' Christmas came and went and things go quiet here in Nashville over that time so they circled back around in February but with a different song. Noah and I started chatting on Instagram and we met up at a studio to listen to the demo which was when I realised the girl signing the vocal on the demo was the one and only Jessi Alexander, writer of ‘The Climb'!
Her voice was so sick, she's such a good singer and I was, like, ‘And you want me on this?' (laughing) ‘Why?' Noah was great and we cut it and when we listened back it sounded so good, the chemistry between us was great too, he's such an awesome human.
Flash forward a couple of months and I'm talking to Scott Borchetta about signing with Nashville Harbor and all of a sudden Noah is singing up too, which was weird, right? (laughing) The stars aligned, he's like a brother to me now but I'm still, to this day, like ‘Jessi Alexander's voice was replaced by mine on that demo!' (laughing)
The follow up song to that one, ‘To Tell You the Truth' is also a banger – what an insane chorus that song has. Did you write that one?
Oh yes! Besides therapy, writing is the one thing that keeps me sane! (laughing) A number of the songs I've produced recently have been about these ‘red flag' men that make you think that you should never bother dating again because of. ‘What If I Don't' was the first chapter in this series and the body of work that I'm working on now will reflect the phases of vulnerability that you go through when dating a person.
During writing these songs I think I learned how to value myself, which I think I didn't know about beforehand. If anything, that has been the coolest part of me moving to Nashville.
Watch Shaylen talking about how hard it was to write ‘To Tell You the Truth' because of how ill she felt on writing day below:
When you listen to me singing the demo of that song you can hear me crying – and I don't know whether I'm crying from the chapter of my life being closed or from the pain that I was in singing it! (laughing)
We wrote the song on August 8th 2023 and I just knew that it was going to be a pivotal point in my career and flash forward almost exactly a year later and it's my first release on Nashville Harbour so I think I proved everybody right in how important the write was! (laughing)
You were born in Chatanooga and raised in Dallas. Did you come from a musical family and when did you first know you wanted to do this for a living?
I came out of the womb with no desire to do anything but make weird noises and eat cookies, that's all I ever wanted to do! The second that my brain could function in terms of thinking about what I wanted to do it was always ‘a singing veterinarian.' (laughing) I then realised, with a little bit of wisdom, that veterinarians don't just cuddle and pat animals they have to do some really hard things and I couldn't do that! That left just singer!
My parents met in the FBI and whilst they played music and loved listening to it but they weren't musicians. I started singing in church around the age of 6 years old and I remember standing there thinking ‘I don't know what this is but I have to do it for the rest of my life!' It wasn't the recognition or validation it was just the only thing that made sense to me in terms of who I was. I learnt the hard way about the industry though, like how you have to make your first advance last for six years, right? (laughing)
And you found yourself in L.A. making music. How similar was life as an aspiring Pop musician in Los Angeles to how it is in Nashville?
Honestly, they are both musically related but as far as how it works, how each city is structured and behaves is drastically different. Nashville works on the live shows, which is fantastic. I was barely ever on a stage living in L.A. I think that starts to wear on you after a while because I just got frustrated that I had all these songs that just lived on social media or a streaming platform because there isn't a live music scene or culture as much in L.A. anymore.
When I got to Nashville, within about the first 3 months, I did more shows there than I had done in 10 years in L.A. My favourite part about this whole experience has just been getting up on a stage and singing, I love it.
When you moved to Nashville did you leave behind a group of peers or colleagues in L.A. that thought you were being somewhat (forgive the pun here) kamikaze? (That's the title of Shaylen's 2016 Pop debut on Spotify)
You know what's funny? Nobody cared about my music, really, in L.A. I was trying so hard and if you listen to some of it there's these underlaying Country melodies that I just couldn't escape from! I was always told out there that I looked too southern for the scene there. When I got to Nashville I thought my artist career was over and I was just here to write songs for other people. I wrote ‘What If I Don't on the first day I was here and thought, or at least hoped, that it would find a home with an artist that loved it as much as I did.
In L.A. the vibe there is not necessarily to always write what's in your heart, it's more about writing in the style of what's popular right now. I was told to write ‘more like Halsey' sometimes, more like Adele with a little bit of Aretha Franklin, right? And I was, like, ‘WHAT?' Writing ‘What If I Don't' was the first time I had just written as myself in so long, I cried when I got into the uber at the end of the session because I felt so much at home. I'm from the south, this was the music I grew up on and the concerts I went to see as a kid. The community here has been so wonderful that it feels like home.
You made your Opry debut this month! Congratulations. Were you nervous? Did the evening pass in a blur or did you get chance to enjoy parts of it?
Oh yeah, that happened! (laughing) I don't know where my head was at that night! My body was there but that's about it! (laughing) It was the coolest day of my life and I'm so glad that I didn't cry the whole way through but do I remember any of it as far as anything that happened? No, absolutely not! (laughing) I did tell Mr Brad Paisley on camera that I pooped my pants, that was great!
Wildly enough I did two shows that night, the 7pm one and the 9pm one so I did remember the second one a little bit more but I think about the 7pm one sometimes and hope it went well! (laughing)
We're approaching the festive season and Country music has a big tradition of Christmas songs – have you got any plans to record one this year or is it a bit late for that now?
Christmas in July is a big thing in the industry – that's when all the albums get recorded. I blinked and it was October, right, so I think it might be too late but you never know! I love ‘Mary Did You Know' and I love Kelly Clarkson's Christmas songs too.
Tell me about your plans for 2025 and a potential bigger body of work that you have coming down the line. What details can you share with me?
I didn't realise, when I first got here, that I had written 107 songs! When I first started talking to Scott about signing with Nashville Harbor he asked me to send him a folder of my songs and I said ‘Weeeeeeeelllllllllllllllll, would you like a condensed version of what I have?' He asked me to send him the best 20. After I sent them he got back to me and said that all of them could make an album! (laughing)
The team are being very patient with me, just last week, when I thought that we had the full list all sorted I wrote another song that I think should be on there! Scott wants to release an album rather than release single after single like some artists do these days, which I'm thrilled about, it will be the first album in my entire career!
Check out Shaylen's developing body of work on streaming platforms like Spotify and keep an eye out for more music coming your way soon.
